Claire Haye continues her holiday tradition
IT’S TOUGH ENOUGH THESE DAYS
for local businesses to stay open. Even more than usual, during the pandemic, they face stiff competition from big box chain stores and online retailers, which usually offer lower prices and a more extensive selection. If you want to see our local businesses survive and prosper, you have to go the extra mile – or more accurately, stay close to home – and shop locally.
Claireworks is one of the many local businesses impacted by COVID closures.
By shopping locally, you reap more benefits. Local businesses hire local workers. In addition to staff for their stores, they hire local architects and contractors for building and remodeling, local accountants and insurance brokers to help them run the business, and they’re also more likely than chain stores to carry goods that are locally produced. All these factors together create a “multiplier effect,” meaning that each dollar spent in a local store brings as much as $3.50 into the local economy. By contrast, large chain stores tend to displace as many local jobs as they create because they often drive local retailers out of business.
Shopping at local businesses also gives neighbors a chance to connect, plus having stores in your immediate neighborhood means you can leave your car parked and do your errands on foot or by bicycle. Fewer cars mean less traffic, less noise and less pollution. If you made just one trip each week on foot instead of making a 10-mile round trip by car, you would reduce your annual driving by 520 miles. That would save about 24 gallons of gas and keep 0.2 metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, according to calculations from the Environmental Protection Agency. If this doesn’t convince you, knowing that it’s better for your health – might.
Walking more is good for the heart and soul, a win-win.
To get to Claireworks, unless you live in Arroyo Seco, you might need to drive, but once there, there is plenty to see on foot.
Claire Haye’s gallery has been part of the Arroyo Seco community for almost 20 years in the same location.
Haye has been making art for the last four decades and jewelry for more than two.
For several years now, Haye has been designing a Holiday Line of Jewelry to benefit Habitat For Humanity in Taos. Half of all sales of these pieces are donated to this very worthy cause. Over the years she has given thousands of dollars to the organization with the help of all who buy her jewelry for themselves or as gifts during the holiday season.
“For me it’s about getting to the essence of what the holidays are really about,” Haye says. “Rather than engaging in the mad consumerism – this relentless materialism – that goes on at this time of year, I choose instead to give to a charitable organization that provides something tangible and good for so many needy people, most especially single mothers and their children.”
Habitat For Humanity is a grassroots (Christian) nonprofit organization dedicated to the elimination of poverty and substandard housing worldwide, that believes that every person deserves a simple and decent place in which to live.
Fifty percent of the sale of Claire’s holiday designs will be contributed to Habitat for Humanity.
Go to claireworks.com.