The Gezellig Manifesto

In October 2006, gezellig-girl.com came to life as a food blog. My family and I had just moved to New York four months earlier and the blog was a way to chronicle our adventures in a new city via food. And, for a while, the blog was a joy to me. I got to know other bloggers; I heard from people in far-flung places; a friend adopted my grandmother’s spaghetti sauce recipe as her own, which still delights me even now.

As the years went on, I began to feel the creative limitations of a food-only blog, while the foodier-than-thou culture embraced by many food bloggers repelled me more and more. So, in June 2010, I announced an end to gezellig-girl.com as a food blog. I took a couple weeks off to think about what I wanted from this site and, more importantly, what I wanted to impart through it.

During this hiatus, I sat down with a notebook and came up with five things that are important to me—with micro-essays about each:

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1. Environment.

I read a number of environmentally-focused websites, and I feel as though I’m constantly seeing sentiment from bloggers and commenters that’s always something like, if you’re not doing everything you can humanly do, you might as well be doing nothing. And I really don’t get that. Sneering at people who “only” make small steps towards sustainability just reinforces the idea that caring about the planet is some rich person’s elitist ideal. As much as we might like to, we can’t all buy $400 CSA shares or drive a Prius or get our kids handcrafted, fair trade, organic Waldorf toys. But if you can’t afford those things—and I know I can’t—it doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do.

So, while I don’t always make the zero-impact choice when I buy things (my daughter’s collection of plastic Littlest Pet Shop figures comes to mind), I do make low- or no-impact choices much more often than the times I don’t, choices that I’ll share with you. These small choices add up quickly and the planet (and usually my bank account) comes out on the plus side.

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2. Small living / city living.

When I sat down to write this section, I looked up how big the average American home is. According to the US Census Bureau, in 2009, the average new single-family house had 2,438 square feet, a slight drop from 2008, when the average single-family house had 2,519 square feet. I quickly got out my calculator. The average home is more than 3.5 times the size of the apartment I share with my husband, our daughter, and three cats.

“Think about it!” I said to my husband (who was not especially far away, as you can imagine, in an apartment this size). “It would be like we each had our own apartment—and the cats could have their own room!” We tried thinking of what we could do with 3.5 apartments worth of space. Have a gift-wrapping room? In-home bowling alley? Mini-movie theater? We finally decided on what would almost surely become of the extra two and a half apartments: they would fill up with crap we didn’t need. Yes, there are trade-offs to small-space city living (like, I could live without hauling 40 pounds of clothes to the laundromat) but that aside, I have a hard time grasping the appeal of living in (and cleaning!) acres of household space. Living in a small space is a bit like living on a boat: pared down to the essentials, I know where everything is (okay, usually) and I don’t keep anything I don’t use regularly or love unconditionally. Living with less clutter around makes it easier to focus on the important things.

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3. Civility.

In the past, there was more than one occasion in which I avoided posting because I didn’t want to deal with the comments. Like, rather than talk about something I’ve done to make my life more environmentally-sustainable, I held back, rather than read a comment like, well, if I can live my off-the-grid yurt, on a goat farm powered by solar panels, then everyone should be able to do that… and if not, well, maybe people just aren’t trying hard enough.

I know I’m exaggerating for effect, but comments like that kill me. They don’t help anyone. They don’t encourage or inspire. They only serve to puff up the ego of the commenter at the price of making others (sometimes even me) feel bad—which is what I mean by “civility.” I don’t want or expect this blog to become any kind of touchy-feely hug factory (you know I’m too bitchy for that), but I am asking you: think before you post. If you’re posting a comment and thinking something like, ha! this will show those losers I’m better than they are, then I will kindly ask you, with all due civility, to fuck off.

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4. Tradition + modern.

This idea was the hardest to write about because it’s more of a feeling than a guiding principle, but he more I thought about it, the more I kept thinking about Rotterdam. It’s a smallish Dutch city (about 500K people), much of which was flattened during WWII. When they rebuilt after the war, they didn’t just duplicate what had been there; they put fantastic new modern buildings alongside the old ones that had survived. So, this is Rotterdam, and this is Rotterdam. And this, and this.

I love this interplay of old and new together, not completely one or the other. It’s not mired in tradition, always looking nostalgically to the past, but it’s also not untethered, without any ties to history. It’s a combination that I put into practice whenever possible: what I wear, what I cook, the furniture in my house, and even what I try to impart to my kid.

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5. Frugality.

Frugality doesn’t always mean cheap. Sometimes it does. More often, it means forgoing something you don’t really need that much to buy something important that you do need—or want. It also means being honest when asking yourself, do I want this or do I need it? Being frugal means “use it up, wear it out, make it do”—or go without. It means self-reliance. It means looking at something and thinking, you know, I could probably just make that myself for less. It doesn’t mean austerity or hardship or self-pity. It means having what you love and loving what you have. It means mending a pair of pants not because you have to, but because it’s gratifying to fix something and then be happy with your work. It means understanding that the occasional indulgence, like a teaspoon of sugar, can make life sweeter while constant indulgence can make you feel terrible. It means quality (of life, of things, of time) not quantity.

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So, there you have it. My Gezellig Manifesto. I hope these ideas keep you reading because they’ll certainly keep me writing.