Tiger Lily's Winter Solstice Drum Circle

There is nothing quite like the experience of a drum circle to help you feel exuberantly and powerfully alive! Holiday revelers may welcome the Winter Solstice and the arrival of Hanukkah by joining in a Spiritual Drum Circle at Tiger Lily on Sunday, December 21 at 4:00 p.m. No musical training is necessary. The drum circle will be led by master drummer Rich Reiter. Rich brings many drums and percussion instruments for everyone to use if you don't have one yourself. Tiger Lily also carries a selection of Fair Trade drums and percussion instruments for those who would like to buy their own. A $10 donation is requested. Refreshments will be served. Tiger Lily is located at 569 Cedar Lane in Teaneck (at the intersection of Cedar Lane and Lincoln Place.)

The Winter Solstice – the shortest day of the year, when the northern hemisphere is at its furthest distance from the sun – has been celebrated by cultures around the world, throughout human history. Drumming and dance are often a part of the festivities. Tiger Lily’s Drum Circle will be an opportunity for anyone and everyone to discover how profoundly moving it can be to drum together in a group. Leader Rich Reiter will teach basic rhythms and drumming techniques for the uninitiated and talk about the cultural histories of drums and spiritual drumming.

Rich Reiter, an acclaimed jazz musician and Emmy Award-winning composer has studied African drumming in Senegal, and has led drum circles around the country including New Jersey venues such as the Puffin Cultural Forum, Outpost in the Burbs, Fairleigh Dickinson University, and Montclair’s First Night. Rich, who is more well-known as a jazz saxophonist and composer, has performed with his ensembles internationally. He was recently acknowledged in a New York Times feature as one of the area’s busiest drum circle leaders.

Drummers and last-minute shoppers may also enjoy other great holiday bargains throughout the day from Tiger Lily’s selection of Fair Trade certified gifts and jewelry crafted by artisans from around the world.

Fifteen Things I Learned on the Campaign Trail*

By Sarah Palin


1.The vice president is customarily listed second on the ticket.

2. A size 4 in an Escada is more like a 2 in a Valentino.

3. The prime minister of Canada is Stephen Harper.

4. The premier of Quebec is Jean Charest.

5. How to pronounce “nuclear.”

6. I need to find a better security question for my Yahoo! Account.

7. Real plumbers join unions.

8. We are not at war with Iran.

9. Afghanistan is not a neighbor of the United States.

10. The vice president is not in charge of the Senate.

11. The First Amendment protects the press from politicians, not the other way around.

12. The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Anchorage Daily News are all newspapers, and many people read them.

13. “Going rogue” is not necessarily a good thing, either for elephants or Republicans.

14. What a community organizer does.

15. And I found out who the real Barack Obama is: He’s the President-elect of the United States of America.

*copyrighted by Tim Blunk

Fall Back - Time Change Arrangements

Time for a Change

Just in time for the election and the end of Daylight Savings...

Here is an arrangement in our showcase, using fall hardy chrysanthemums (NJ grown, organic), orange gerberas, and the last of the season's NJ sunflowers. We created a "bower" with a stem of myrtle, along with a wire-wrapped spray of beargrass. The intersecting circles emerging from the square vase create a more contemporary look to merge with the more traditional fall colors.

You can find these arrangements and many more in our two Teaneck locations: Tiger Lily Flowers on Cedar Lane, and Encke Flowers on Queen Anne Road.

The florist and community ritual...

Tiger Lily is located in Teaneck, home to a growing and vibrant observant Jewish population. We are nearing the end of the Jewish High Holy Days, including Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Succot and Simcha Torah. Much of our business centers around Shabbat on Fridays, when men customarily stop in to buy flowers for their wives, often accompanied by exuberant children, calling out "Shabbat Shalom! Good Shabbos!"

I have been struck by the unique position that a florist occupies in the community. We have the opportunity to assist or facilitate so many varied rituals. In the Teaneck community, where there are 40 different languages spoken at the local middle school, there is a wealth of such rituals - it is a full-time occupation to try and keep track of them all and to comprehend their significance. We are privileged, indeed.

So much of the floral industry's trade journals concentrate on marketing, maximizing profit and high-tech tracking of COGs (cost-of-goods). I have yet to see anyone write about quiet pleasure of assisting a family in celebrating their gratefulness for being and for each other, or the role of the florist as bartender/psychologist/faith healer, trying to help a ususally decent guy get out of the doghouse.

There may be a little less profit in this approach. But there is an ineffable connection to our community that, I would argue, is so much more important.

Green Wedding|Celebration|Alternative Weddings|Eco-wedding

Green Weddings -
Adding an element of "sustainability" to your relationship.


It doesn't have to be New Age, or involve dances before Gaia (although it could...). Making a commitment to becoming life partners is a statement of relational integrity. An engagement or wedding is or should be an affirmation of what each individual in the union has become in her/his life and for what they can become for each other, together, in the future. It makes sense that the symbols and rituals incorporate the best elements of the beliefs and values that the couple hold in common.

Many couples are foregoing diamonds as a symbol of engagement, based upon the diamond trade's roots in civil war and destabilization in Africa. Others are refusing to enter into the "gift registry" merchandizing bonanza promoted by the big department stores. Folks we know, who are concerned about the suspect pedigree (and expense) of imported cut flowers are using flowers and foliage they have grown themselves or are buying from local farms - a practice we heartily encourage.

We offer a sustainable alternative to couples who want their weddings/celebrations to reflect their beliefs: the Green Wedding. We are very happy to sit with you and discuss the amazing assortment of locally grown and/or Fair Trade organic cut flowers or plants that can be used in our designs. Our consultations become a brainstorming session on the ways that a celebration can make use of (elegant!) recycled or recyclable products - from Fair Trade certified and/or organic flowers to paper goods to the wedding dress itself.

Give us a call at either shop, Encke or Tiger Lily, and we'll be happy to talk "green".
201-836-1276 or 201-287-1800
http://www.tigerlilyflowershop.net/

Tulip Mania and Speculative Bubbles (the undeserving tulip)

Most students of economics know that capitalism was born in the Netherlands during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Holland, in fact, birthed the world's first commodity futures market, and logically, the world's first speculative bubble. The commodity that caused a financial frenzy wasn't gold, silver, tobacco or silk.

It was the tulip.

Tulips were highly valued and sought after as symbols of affluence. Because their bulbs reproduced cloned buds and could be dug up and transported at the end of their season, their "futures" could be traded and speculated upon. In 1636, a highly prized variety of tulip was discovered and cultivated (it was infected with a mosaic virus that gave the flower brilliant striations of color). During a lull in the 30 Years War, the French entered the tulip market, and the bidding on the mosaic-infected varieties took off. The price of the bulbs at its height was 150 times the average yearly earnings for a skilled craftsman or guild member (they formed the majority of speculators). The frenzy became known as the Tulip Mania of 1636, and the flower has become a symbol of rampant speculative fever ever since.

In our era, the symbol should no longer be the undeserving tulip. It rightfully should be the Bush.

Flowers for your broker...

Yesterday we ran a

"Wall Street Bail-out Special."
Free* flowers.

(*Your children will pay for them later...)


Today's sale:

Hardy* Mums: $7.99 (or 2.2 Euros)
* "fundamentally strong..."

How do main street businesses respond to Wall Street crises? On Monday morning, the streets of suburban Teaneck were like a ghost town. I imagined everyone at home, hiding under their blankets, wondering if the news anchors were going to go on the air and just announce that The Great Depression II has now begun. It won't happen like that, of course - anymore than the Crash of '29 was signalled by brokers leaping from office building windows.

This is Reaganomics coming home to roost. And what a dirty, pestilential flock of birds it is.

How do like deregulation now? It's a technicolor example of privatized profit and socialized debt. Keep government out of the affairs of business - until, of course, it comes time to pull their miserable, bloated selves out of the gutter. But this is not just "corporate greed" or something endemic only to Wall Street. It's structural. It is the logic of capitalism itself. Which is why the answers must also be structural, and they must adhere to an entirely different kind of logic: people (including future generations of people) before profits. Just a thought.