As days grow dark, candles are a lovely way to keep the light shining.

While beeswax and soy candles are great any time, bayberry candles are burned traditionally on Christmas and New Year to bring wealth and good luck for the coming year. This tradition began in the American colonies, where bayberry candles were first made. An old saying goes, "Bayberry candles burned to the socket, bring health to the home and wealth to the pocket!"

To learn more about the health effects of candles and how to choose candles that are the most healthful and natural, read the excerpt from my book Home Safe Home about candles.

To find natural beeswax, soy, and bayberry candles on the Internet, see the candle page of Debra's List.

With so much to explore on Debra's List, be sure to visit the General Household page. Here you'll find eleven links (and more to come) for sites that sell a wide variety of products that benefit health and the environment for all around the house.

I've grouped these links together to make it easy for you to access sites that offer one-stop shopping. When looking for a specific product, remember to look on this page as well as the product-specific pages.

I regret to announce that the publication of Home Safe Home has been delayed by my publisher yet again. So no books for Christmas this year. At this point all they will tell me about the publication date is "early 2005."

In the meantime, I've posted the Table of Contents and a never-before-published excerpt from the new edition, which I invite you to read.

Everything we do in our lives affects the environment--for better or for worse--but it's not always easy to see how our causes create environmental effects that can come back to harm our own health. Here's a dramatic example.

Fluorescent lamps are widely used today because they are so energy-efficient. Indeed, in many areas of the country building codes require them in bathrooms and kirchens for new construction.

A fluorescent lamp creates light by exciting mercury vapor, therefore, mercury is essential to the functioning of any fluorescent lamp. But it is also extremely harmful to the environment and our health. Mercury causes damage to the brain, spinal cord, kidneys, and liver. It is especially harmful to small children and during fetal development.

Whenever you throw a fluorescent tube into the trash, and it goes to an incinerator or landfill, mercury is released into the environment. This mercury converts to an even more toxic form that is readily absorbed by aquatic plants and fish. As these are eaten by even bigger fish higher on the food chain, mercury levels bioaccumulate to very high levels. A walleye pike, for example, can contain 250,000 times the mercury present in the water it lives in.

That one fluorescent tube you might throw in the trash contains enough mercury to contaminate a lake about the size of a football field (360 x 160 feet, or 57,600 square feet--more than half a million gallons of fresh water). More than 40 states have issued health warnings against eating certain species because of this concern.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

• Dispose of your fluorescent tubes properly. The EPA has classified them as hazardous waste. Contact your local household hazardous waste program for recycling instructions instructions, or order a recycling kit online..
• Contact your local Department of Fish and Game for regional fish contamination warnings. Find out the source of the fish sold by your fishmonger eat uncontaminated fish.
• Stop eating canned tuna--all canned tuna contains mercury. Chunk light tuna contains less mercury than white albacore. The EPA recommends that adults should eat less than one small can of chunk light tuna per week, and children should eat even less.
• Purchase compact fluorescent lamps or low-mercury fluorescent tubes. These still give energy savings with less mercury. Check with your local hazardous waste program, as some communities do not allow even these in landfills.

I love when you write to me and tell me things that work for you, so I can share your tips with others. Here's one from a reader in California...

I've been experimenting with baking soda to remove stains from some white dishes.

I've owned these dishes for about 15 years now, so they are showing their wear. In addition, our consumption of flax seed oil in our breakfast cereal bowls over the last few years seems to have built up to the point of real visibility now.

We wash our dishes by hand, but even BonAmi and a copper scrubbie would not remove the oil that crept into all the little indents on the top rim of the bowls, which have a raised pattern of fruit and leaves (also in white).

Finally I remembered how well the baking soda worked last summer to clean the overdue oven mess. I sprinkled baking soda all around the pre-dampened rims of the bowls. Some also would fall into the bowls themselves, where there were scratches of wear, presumably from stacking. I let the bowls sit overnight in the oven (a non-drafty place, so that the baking soda would not dry as fast.

The next day I was able to scrub the rims with an old toothbrush and very little elbow grease and voila! the stains were gone! Then I moved into the actual concave area of the bowls and scrubbed the scratches, just out of curiousity. They disappeared as well and now the bowls look like brand new!

Wow, I'm going to have a practically new set of dishes, because I'm now applying this baking soda technique to every plate in the set as well!

J. B-G
Sebastopol CA

Hi Debra,

I've been looking for flannel sheets but noticed that many are imported. Not real clear on this issue, so do I need to be concerned about the type of dye that is used in any imported fabric? Which would mean only made in U.S. cotton or organic would be safe. Thanks for any info.

J.G.
Lake Hughes, Ca

I've been sleeping on flannel sheets for over twenty years and have never noticed and ill effect from the dyes.

If a dye is "colorfast" -- that is, that it stays in the fabric without coming out during use or washing, it is staying within the fabric. If, for example, you wore a red shirt, and ended up with red armpits, some of the dye may be absorbed through your skin and into your bloodstream. I am not aware of any reason to be concerned about dyes that are colorfast.

Debra :-)