LION’s Xmas Gift Ideas
by Sam Siva
I’m not much of a Christmas person, my Mum on the other hand is. She demands that the family returns home for a huge meal with roast jerk seasoned chicken, honey glazed gammon, Jamaican rice and peas, a vegan nut roast, gravy and roast veggies. Our Christmas dinner is a blend of Caribbean classics with a rum soaked fruit cake and fresh salad greens combined with British standards we’ve adopted such as my favourite yorkshire puddings and roast potatoes. She loves listening to Christmas playlists and watching cheesy Christmas films.
Josina is a big Xmas kid while the rest of us in LION call ourselves “Scrooge" or seem to have forgot that we’ve got big families expecting gifts of some kind. With that in mind we’ve put together a list of gift ideas that you will inspire you. This list has the double benefit of (hopefully) bringing joy to family members (chosen or biological) and secondly supporting some great organisations and individuals who we think are doing important work!
Landworkers’ Alliance “Another Farm Is Possible” 2021 calendar
With beautiful hand carved lino prints by Rosanna Morris on recycled brown card that looks, feels and smells amazing. Earthily colourful, we are grateful that LION is featured as July’s collective.
Herbalists Without Borders Bristol
HWBB’s brilliant calendars and posters are filled with recipes, herb wisdom and detailed illustrations. You can bulk order both the Wildcrafting Throughout The Year and the 2021 Calendar from their shop.
Alinah makes a whipped shea butter blends that smell and feel phenomenal, nourishing both your hair and skin. One blend Shea Butter and Coconut oil and the other combines Shea with Mango Seed Butter and Lime essential oil.
Green Soul Grace Sustainable Reuseables
Green Soul Grace’s shop features a range of zero-waste products that come with beautiful handcrafted ankara fabric cases. From totes to bamboo cutlery, if you want to get some environmentally friendly reusables check out her shop!
Solidarity Apothecary are accomplices doing amazing work! You can support them by either buying some of their handmade herbal remedies including tinctures, T-shirts, books and bandanas. You can also donate to them directly!
YaYa Bones aka Ayesha Tan Jones of ‘Fertile Souls’ has just released their debut EP “With songs and spells 3 years in the making, this EP is an emergence of many more sonic sounds to come. Upon release, you will receive a download to the tracks, a digital spell book with images, rituals, and more!”
They will be donating some of their sales profits to LION and other organisations.
A collective of writers, artists and activists, The Classwork Project looks to platform and publish working class and poor writers in their monthly journal “Lumpen”. They also publish chapbooks, novels and memoirs.
How to Grow Your Own Dinner by Claire Ratinon
Claire Ratinon is a friend and inspiration to the LION team. Recently having moved to the country to grow on the land, we are big stans! In her book she demystifies growing your own food in the comfort of your home!
The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes
Another friend of LION, Nick Hayes helped design our logo and has been a supporter from the very beginning. His brilliant book '“Trespass” has just been published this year, exploring the right to roam and adventures trespassing estates and the many places that the public are not entitled to go.
We Feed The World by The Gaia Foundation
From the Gaia Foundation’s brilliant photo exhibition comes this beautiful photo book featuring a foreword by Vandana Shiva. With beautiful portraits and images showing the world’s farmers.
Green Unpleasant Land by Corinne Fowler
Combining essays, poems and stories, "Green Unpleasant Land" by Corinne Fowler details the colonial links of country houses, moorlands, woodlands, village pubs and graveyards. Green Unpleasant Land argues that, in response to recent advances in British imperial history, contemporary authors have reshaped the pastoral writing to break the powerful association between the countryside and Englishness. We’ll be going to the reading group on January 26th - you can join too here.
While you might not get anything physical from this, this fundraiser is incredibly important and whatever donation you give would make all the difference.
“Starting in September this year, the new programme will recruit, mentor and support nine emerging leaders – the Black and Green Ambassadors. Over three years, they will work between diverse communities, businesses, organisations and individuals on issues of environmental sustainability, equality, diversity and inclusion. If it’s half as good as the pilot programme, Black and Green Ambassadors will create genuine, lasting, systemic change.”
This is our Xmas gift list so far! Initially we were planning on including them all in our newsletter but the list grew too long thanks to great suggestions from our community and collective. But before we end this post I wanted to remind all our accomplices to buy local and independent. Black bookshops like New Beacon Books and My Book Basket, or independent book suppliers Bookshop. Radical distributors Dog Section Press and Active Distribution and collectives, artists and craftspeople hustling in these tough times need our support more than Amazon or big supermarkets.
With love and rage, have a merry Xmas!
