Thursday 11 December 2014

Streetbank's Give A Thing Away Each Day of Advent Challenge - Days 6-10

For Day 6 of this challenge organised by Streetbank.com, where I aim to give something away every day of Advent in an attempt to counter the consumerism of Christmas, I decided to send off some postage stamps I'd collected for recycling by the RNIB.  I always cut postage stamps off envelopes for this purpose and have been doing so for some years now, although I did used to send them to the Guide Dogs for the Blind, until I heard that they had stopped recycling them.  More recently, it does seem to take longer to collect enough to send off, as very little of the mail we receive is stamped these days, but when I do have an envelope full or thereabouts, I pop them in the post.

The RNIB recycle British or overseas stamps and as we regularly get post from my sister in Australia, plus sometimes other countries if we've bought something from abroad, there are usually quite a few reasonably interesting stamps in each envelope.  I think I must have collected these for a full year, as there were quite a few Christmas stamps in this envelope.  I cut around the stamps as neatly as I could without damaging them and sent them off to this address

RNIB Stamp Recycling
PO Box 185
Benfleet
Essex
SS7 9BH.

If you decide to start sending in stamps, please don't forget to put a stamp on the envelope as this is NOT a Freepost address.

Day 7 - For this day of the challenge I decided to sort through some of Little Bird's outgrown clothes and make a pile of items to give to a relative with a younger child, who might be able to make good use of them.  We won't actually see them until after Christmas to hand them over, but they will be kept to one side and taken with us when we go up to Yorkshire.  Charity begins at home and if they can be reused within the family and help save other family members some money in the long run, then that is a positive outcome.  Hopefully, Little Bird's cousin will like at least some of them and get some use out of them.

Day 8 - As it was Monday, my busiest day of the week and also the day of my Monday morning dog walk, I decided to once again donate a few books I no longer wanted to my local Little Free Library and dutifully dropped them in on my walk.  It was interesting to see that all the books I left in there last week had gone.  A good sign.

Day 9 - Tuesday, and  I donated a couple of magazines to my doctor's surgery for patients to read whilst they are waiting.  They were Christmas magazines that I had read and didn't want to keep.  They will probably disappear pretty quickly (call me cynical), as most magazines seem to do from waiting areas in my experience, but if they bring a bit of pleasure or distraction to someone who maybe can't afford to buy a magazine, or is nervously waiting to see the doctor, where's the harm?

Day 10 -  Yesterday, I took a few bags of clothes and Christmas items to the Salvation Army charity shop, where I often drop off, in an attempt to clear space on the landing, which was looking a little cluttered.

Just to let you know I finally found my way to the Dog Warden's office, which had moved.  I found this out from a fellow dog walker over the weekend.  Anyway, I was able to drop off the towels at last, so hopefully they can be put to good use.

2 comments:

  1. Very well done. I never thought of saving stamps.... One of the schools collects them and sends them somewhere to be put to good use.

    God bless.

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