The US Environmental Protection Agency shares the following message for reducing waste through reuse and recycling during the holiday season.

• After the holidays, look for ways to recycle your tree instead of sending it to a landfill. Check with your community solid waste department and find out if they collect and mulch trees. Your town might be able to use chippings from mulched trees for hiking trails or beachfront erosion barriers.
• Buy a potted tree and plant it after the holidays.
• Have a create your own decorations party! Invite family and friends to create holiday decorations such as ornaments made from old greeting cards or cookie dough, garlands made from strung popcorn or cranberries, wreaths made from artificial greens and flowers, and potpourri made from kitchen spices such as cinnamon and cloves.
• Turn off or unplug holiday lights during the day. Doing so will not only save energy, but will also help your lights last longer.
• If you’re buying new greeting cards this holiday season, send recycled-content greeting cards. Buying recycled encourages manufacturers to make more recycled-content products available. Also consider sending electronic cards, and remember to recycle any paper cards you receive.
• Think “green” while shopping holiday and birthday sales. Try to buy items with minimal packaging and/or made with recycled content. Check product labels to determine an item’s recyclability and whether it is made from recycled materials.

• This holiday, Consider the durability of a product before you buy it as a gift. Cheaper, less durable items often wear out quickly, creating waste and costing you money. Look for items that embody the concept of reuse. For example: wooden toys made from scrap wood, craft kits that take advantage of used goods and discards, and drawing boards that can be erased and reused.

• Thousands of paper and plastic shopping bags end up in landfills every year. Reduce the number of bags thrown out by bringing reusable cloth bags for holiday gift shopping. Tell store clerks you don’t need a bag for small or oversized purchases. Use reusable cloth bags instead of disposable ones for trick-or-treating.
• Wrap gifts in recycled or reused wrapping paper or funny papers. Also remember to save or recycle used wrapping paper. Give gifts that don’t require much packaging, such as concert tickets or gift certificates.
• Donate the older toys that your children no longer use to charities. Also check with local libraries. A number of public libraries have extended their children’s section to include a lending collection of toys, games, puzzles, and musical instruments.
• Many battery sales occur during the holiday season. Buy rechargeable batteries to accompany your electronic gifts, and consider giving a battery charger as well. Rechargeable batteries reduce the amount of potentially harmful materials thrown away, and can save money in the long run.
• When giving flowers as gifts, consider buying long-lasting silk flowers, potted plants, or live bushes, shrubs, or trees that can be planted in the spring as gifts.
• Bake cookies or other goodies for your friends and love ones and package them in reusable and/or recyclable containers as gifts. Homemade goodies show how much you care and help you avoid packaging waste.
• If you host a party, set the table with cloth napkins and reusable dishes, glasses, and silverware. Consider renting more formal tableware that you might not use very often. Also save and reuse party hats, decorations, and favors.

• After holiday festivities, put leftovers in recyclable containers, and share them with family, friends, or others. Donate whole, untouched leftovers from parties to a local food bank or homeless shelter.

• Where possible, compost leftover food scraps, leaves, and grass clippings.
• After parties, fill your dishwasher to capacity before running it. You will run fewer cycles, which saves energy.
• Wash and reuse empty holiday glass and plastic jars, milk jugs, coffee cans, dairy tubs, and other similar containers that would otherwise get thrown away. These containers can be used to store leftovers as well as buttons, nails, or other loose items.

An enhanced E-book

We  are pleased to announce publishing “Can Santa Find Me on Christmas?”, which is our first enhanced e-book for young readers. It  features animation, narration, and text highlighting to engage and assist emerging readers in developing independent reading skills.

In our enhanced e-book, Santa goes digital, using modern day solutions for the age-old worry of children away from home on Christmas. In “Can Santa Find Me on Christmas?” the “Can Do” Kids learn how Santa will deliver their gifts to them wherever they are.

In the beginning of our enhanced e-book, the reader is offered the choice of reading the book independently or with the enhancements of animation, narration and text highlighting. Animation is used sparingly to prevent distracting a young reader from listening to the story and identifying each word as it is highlighted.

Each of the 22 pages in the enhanced e-book features the “Can Do” characters in full color illustrations.

You can go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NfNHFw2-9I  to view a YouTube trailer of our enhanced e-book, “Can Santa find Me on Christmas?”. It was published on Nov 30, 2016

Our enhanced e-book is the first of new happenings on”Can Do” Street. There is more to come in  2017…stay tuned!

All the best,

Jean

Most supermarkets now carry a line of products labelled “gluten-free.” Many of us are choosing to buy and eat these new cookies, breads and other products we believe to be made without  flour. For most of us, it is a choice to avoid white flour, which we may consider not healthy for us.

For the three million Americans who have Celiac disease, a gluten free diet is there only choice  in managing their autoimmune digestive condition.

The FDA recently issued a new rule that provides standard definition to protect the health of Americans with Celiac disease. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration published a new regulation defining the term “gluten-free” for voluntary food labeling.

The press release issued by the FDA reads,“Adherence to a gluten-free diet is the key to treating Celiac disease, which can be very disruptive to everyday life,” said FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg, M.D. “The FDA’s new ‘gluten-free’ definition will help people with this condition make food choices with confidence and allow them to better manage their health. This new federal definition standardizes the meaning of “gluten-free” claims across the food industry. It requires that, in order to use the term “gluten-free” on its label, a food must meet all of the requirements of the definition, including that the food must contain less than 20 parts per million of gluten. The rule also requires foods with the claims “no gluten,” “free of gluten,” and “without gluten” to meet the definition for “gluten-free.”

The FDA recognizes that many foods currently labeled as “gluten-free” may be able to meet the new federal definition already. Food manufacturers will have a year after the rule is published to bring their labels into compliance with the new requirements.

“We encourage the food industry to come into compliance with the new definition as soon as possible and help us make it as easy as possible for people with Celiac disease to identify foods that meet the federal definition of ‘gluten-free,” said Michael R. Taylor, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine.

“The term “gluten” refers to proteins that occur naturally in wheat, rye, barley and cross-bred hybrids of these grains.  In people with Celiac disease, foods that contain gluten trigger production of antibodies that attack and damage the lining of the small intestine. Such damage limits the ability of Celiac disease patients to absorb nutrients and puts them at risk of other very serious health problems, including nutritional deficiencies, osteoporosis, growth retardation, infertility, miscarriages, short stature, and intestinal cancers.”

The FDA was directed to issue the new regulation by the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act (FALCPA), which directed FDA to set guidelines for the use of the term “gluten-free” to help people with Celiac disease maintain a gluten-free diet.

The regulation was published in the Federal Register.

For more information:

• FDA: Gluten-Free Labeling
• FDA: Gluten-Free Labeling Final Rule Q&A
• Consumer Update

This Halloween why not encourage your Trick or Treaters to share some of their Halloween bounty with others who could use a treat?

Let’s face it, kids don’t need all the candy they get on Halloween. Sharing their bounty is a great way of practicing kindness and generosity.

Here are a few suggestions as to what to do with the Halloween candy your children are willing to share with others:

• What a treat it would be for residents of a senior assisted living facility to receive a visit from young children in costumes giving out a part of their goodies. What happy memories it would bring back for the seniors! What a lasting memory it would be for the children to witness the happiness they were giving just by sharing a little bit of their time and a few pieces of candy.

• There are children who will not get to go trick or treating. Two groups of children that will not be trick or treating are those that live in homeless shelters with their moms, and those that live with their moms in safe houses for domestic violence victims. You will need to call your local Dept of Social Services to find out where you can drop off Halloween candies for these two groups. Their exact locations, especially domestic violence safe houses, are not given out to the public.

• Another good use for all that extra Halloween candy-send it in a care package to our troops serving overseas.  This could be a great school, church or recreation center group project.  How wonderful for child to get a letter from a soldier, who is overseas, thanking him or her for sharing Halloween. For more information on how to collect and where to send the candy go to:

www.dosomething.org/actnow/actionguide/how-collect-halloween-candy-our-troops#

The following post is from Scott McClatchy, husband, father, musician, and friend to many.

One of the strangest things about being a parent is that there are so many things that I never imagined that would ever concern me have now become part of my everyday life.  Like explaining to a six-year old boy what exactly does it means to be a friend.

One of the toughest hurdles to cross in this daily conversation is that not all parents believe in the same thing.  So, as I tell my son one thing, he inevitably will respond with an example of how one of his school buddies acts the exact opposite.  When I tell my son to try to make ‘good choices’ – like sharing your toys, he’ll remind me that when he shares his toys, he will sometimes never see them again. So now the conversation takes a left turn into the idea that being a good friend also means respecting other people’s property, and he will bring up examples of all the kids who don’t.  Soon the conversation has splintered into so many different ideas of what being a friend means, that it leads my son to retreat to his toy room for some well deserved play time Though, in retrospect, I should be proud of my son’s courtroom presentation of his case … I just wish I knew more about the Kindergarten legal system.

So I try to fall back on the Golden Rule; if you really want to be a good friend – Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  Sadly, scriptures don’t go over well with most kids under the age of thirty-five, so I try to break it down for him.

‘Being a good friend means that you should try to always make sure your friends are happy.’  And, to my son’s credit, he usually does tell me that he often does let his buddies choose what games to play or pick what sport to attempt.  And, happily, I have watched him do this on the playground.  But I’ll tell my son that not all kids want to play together … and that’s OK!  I’ll tell him that someone who might not want to play with you today, or be your friend today – well, they might want to tomorrow, so don’t ever stop asking. But, most importantly, when someone doesn’t want to play with you, or be your friend, try to understand that you still are a really great kid. And, somewhere in the park or playground, there’s another little boy or girl just waiting to play with you.

And it’s at these times when I can explain to him, and I very often get to see it happen, that ‘being a friend’ can be nothing more than walking up to another child and saying “Hi, want to play?”