The Irish Gifts & Jewelry Blog

I just added a new article to our website on Celtic Crosses - their origins, and meaning.  You can visit the article at the link below.

Celtic Cross

I’ve just published our first Squidoo page, though there is still a bit of work to be done, including some house-cleaning and addition to it.  However, feel free to drop by if you’d like!  You can find us here.

Some of the best Irish gifts are the free ones! I have finally gotten around to finishing the coding for the 2009 version of our Saint Patrick’s Day Countdown Google Gadget. It runs on Google Desktop (which is a lot like the Windows Vista sidebar, only better, and it works on Windows XP). Installing is simple, and it counts down the remaining days, hours, minutes, and seconds until our favorite day!

If you need to install the Google Desktop application, you can get it from Google here. Once done, there is a link at the end of this post for the Saint Patrick’s Day Gadget. Click on the link, save the file to your desktop, and then double-click the saved file.

Right now, the Gadget is with Google to be entered into the Google Gadget Gallery (say that three times quickly). It normally takes a week or two to be included. Once it is there, I’ll post the link and also update the 2008 Countdown page. HOWEVER, if you’d like to download the 2009 Gadget without waiting, it is available at the link below.

2009 St. Patrick’s Day Countdown

OK, so a little play on words there - we offer Irish gifts, and a lot of what we sell is, of course, green. But, I was actually after a more serious topic. By our very nature as an online retailer, we’re in a position to either:

1) do a lot of good for the environment, or
2) do a lot of damage to the environment

As responsible business owners, Julie and I have chosen option #1. Where we can make the largest impact is in how we run our warehouse. We receive a lot of product into it, and we ship a lot of product back out. What we’ve done is added large sorting bins to the receiving area in order that we can “salvage” the packing material used in our deliveries. Obviously, we only keep the stuff that still has life left in it. But, if it is perfectly good, why discard it?

When we ship, we re-use the material from the bins (they have wheels that make life a bit easier…) in some of the outbound packages. Naturally, not all of them are suitable candidates. Kraft paper, for example can be less than optimum material for long flat items, etc.

The boxes are another story - we normally have to recycle them. Most of them are simply too big to be re-used, but every now and then, we do get the chance. Mainly, they are stacked for weekly deliveries at the local recycling center. I cringe when I see other businesses simply fill dumpsters with cardboard boxes. It just seems like such a waste. Recycling is also the name of the game for office paper - even the shredded, cross-cut stuff.

You’d be surprised what a difference the above makes, compared to what it could be. For the most part, our only trash is the normal stuff that people discard. I’d ask you to think along the same lines when you receive a package from us, or anyone else, for that matter. Perhaps you’ll be mailing packages at Christmas that you can use the boxes and materials for. What about storage? None of us ever seem to have enough!

Whatever the use, there is an excellent chance that both the box and the packing material have another trip or two left in them. I’m convinced that small steps like this can make a long term difference on the planet that we all share. So don’t forget to go green with an Irish gift!