TIME TO THINK ABOUT CHARITY

This year's National Trust Christmas cards

Saturday November 8,2008

By Alan Titchmarsh

Just a quick reminder to anyone who likes to send cards and gifts from charity Christmas catalogues that it’s not too early to place your order to avoid postal delays and last minute panics.

Catalogues arrive automatically if you’ve used them before – but there’s still time to send off for ones you want; find details, order catalogues or buy direct via the internet.

If you aren’t keen on relying on the post, there are still several weekends left for “charity shopping” in person.

National Trust gift shops can be found in some high streets, as well as those stately homes that stay open in the run-up to Christmas or which hold pre-Christmas events, and they are good for a wide range of cards and gifts.

For Royal Horticultural Society cards and gifts you’ll find the biggest and best selection at Wisley, Ripley, Surrey, just off the M25 (which has a brilliant gardening bookshop attached) but all the RHS gardens have great gift shops.

Large independent gardens, as long as they are open at this time of year, will often also have a novel range of goods on sale. In Cornwall the Eden Project has a positively enormous gift shop full of real eco-friendly novelties. Chatsworth in Derbyshire has masses to offer, too.

For wildlife cards and nature-related gifts, larger RSPB reserves have shops at their visitor centres, as do Wildfowl and Wetland Trusts such as Slimbridge in Gloucestershire, Welney in East Anglia and Arundel in West Sussex.

Large wildlife centres will have a good giftshop as well – in Norfolk try Pensthorpe at Fakenham.

When you can’t decide what to give someone, the other thing you can do is to take out a membership of the organisation concerned in their name. You can even cut out the middle man and donate directly to the charity of your choice and let them know that you’ve done so in a suitable card.

Since the credit crunch, charitable donations have dropped considerably and a lot of organisations – especially less well known or local ones – are struggling.

As gifts go, this is perhaps one of the best you can give.