Want to help others this season but not sure where to start? Here’s some ideas to get you going.

Choosing a local gift for Valentine’s Day can take the Hallmark out of the holiday. Here are some ideas for locally sourced gifts on Valentine’s Day.

Everyone has their shopping weakness, and mine is a well stocked pet boutique. Not the kind selling doggie strollers and puppy sweaters – although my pit bull does look cute in pink – but a place with knowledgeable staff, natural foods, and well-made equipment and toys.

Cadeaux Gifts in Sapperton never ceases to impress and entice. It is “a trendy boutique and gift store providing the best in essential indulgences” and is easily one of the Lower Mainland’s best-kept secrets.

Piccolo World Gifts is a small Sapperton storefront with a global worldview. Inside, you’ll find an assortment of bright, beautiful, and sometimes random treasures from around the world. It’s interesting enough on its own, but chatting with store owner Nancy Patrick brings a whole new appreciation to her collection.

As the Christmas shopping season arrives with Black Friday in the US, I can’t think of anything more ridiculous than camping outside of a store in order to buy stuff. Except for shooting, trampling or pepper-spraying your fellow shoppers in order to get at said stuff, of which there were many reported instances this year.

A drug-addicted single mother of a 10-year-old girl trying and failing to hold her life together. A father of two, the sole breadwinner in the family, laid off from his job and desperate for work. Families like these struggle to scrape together money for groceries, let alone presents. As evidenced by the long lines at Metro Vancouver’s largest food bank here in New Westminster, many local families need help. They need you and me to step forward and offer it.

I like Christmas presents that get used up or used often. My husband just brought up the Christmas decorations from our crawl space and somehow we’ve become the kind of people who have 13 Rubbermaid containers full of them. (13!) Trying to find room for everything made me realize how cluttered our house is getting, so I’m not into giving or receiving gifts that are just going to take up more space. Since I’ve committed to shopping locally for a year, I’m also interested in finding gifts that are made as locally as possible. Here are some of the places I will be doing my Christmas shopping this year.

Get the kids together to participate in this Halloween craft activity that makes a great gift for family and friends who also love your little pumpkin!

New Westminster may have a great family Halloween tradition in the making with The Metro Hall’s ‘spooktacular’ Haunted Hall. On October 31, The Metro will transform its 8000 square foot events centre into a Haunted Hall in support of local charities. The family-friendly event will feature creepy cobwebs, ghosts and goblins, spooky sounds, a bouncy castle, tricks and treats, Halloween movies on a big screen and haunted hall tours with live spooks for the not so faint of heart.

Mother’s Day is coming up. While thoughtful, free gifts of breakfast in bed and family outings to special places are always a great idea for mums, it also feels good to have someone splurge on you. Shop locally, and you can find a great gift for mum while also supporting our community. Here are my New Westminster gift picks for Mother’s Day.

New Westminster is a haven for unique boutiques. Perhaps it’s the character buildings lining our main shopping districts chock-a-block that draw the proprietors of these neat little businesses … or maybe just the low rents that can be found in some of our legendarily ‘up and coming’ neighbourhoods.

Here are some of my picks for places to go when you’re looking for that unique ‘special something’ for the person who’s hard to buy for.

With a DS- and Pokemon-obsessed eight-year-old stepson, a two-year-old whose alter ego is Prince Philip the Knight and a newborn girl I’m looking forward to spoil, I’ve had a personal interest in finding good local Christmas gifts & activities for kiddies.

Here’s where I’ve been shopping for gifts for my kids here in New West. (Hint: Sapperton is the place to be!)

There’s a million green gifts out there, and an even larger number of gifts pretending to be green but really, with huge carbon footprints and huge consumptive and wasteful histories. Green really is the new black.
We’re selecting a few green goodies you might not necessarily see in your average Green Gift Guide in the mass media- and a few goodies special to New West and Tenth to the Fraser.

Homegrown right here in New Westminster is the Biggest Little Garden in Town project. Originally designed to bring fresh produce to apartment-dwelling …

I am the singular regular Tenth to the Fraser contributor who loves sports. I’m a hockey fan – primarly Vancouver Giants but I’d take tickets to the Canucks, the Chillwack Bruins, the Abbotsford Heat, or more or less anything at our local arenas. I’m also a former soccer player, coach, and referee of both women’s and girls’ soccer here in New Westminster. I like organized sports – I think they build valuable skills like working with a team, being cooperative, attaining goals, and friendly competition. New Westminster offers many options in the …

It started off as a brainstorming session in which the editorial staff were sitting around ruminating about shopping locally over a glass of wine (or four). We started coming up with our favourites here in New West, stores that are hidden treasures and gems of awesomeness and started feeling pretty good about not having to leave the city to find a gift for everyone on your list. That conversation has evolved into a special series we’re calling Hyack the Holidays that we will be kicking off today. We invite Tenth …