There’s one week left to Christmas and if you’re like me, you’ve made arrange­ments with your loved ones to a) not ex­change presents; or b) buy small, yet mean­ing­ful gifts for each other. For the rest of you with long shop­ping lists, here’s a sug­ges­tion – give the gift of nature.

The Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) runs al­ter­na­tive gift-giving pro­grams to help al­le­vi­ate hol­i­day stress, while con­serv­ing na­ture at the same time. They’ve just launched Gifts of Canadian Nature and you can com­plete your hol­i­day shop­ping with a few clicks of your mouse. You can shop for your friends, rel­a­tives and co-workers from the com­fort of your own home, even whilst wear­ing pa­ja­mas (or what­ever you wear when you’re surf­ing the web, that’s your own business.)

It works like this – for $40 to $160, your gift do­na­tion helps the NCC work to pre­serve and pro­tect eco­log­i­cally sig­nif­i­cant land in Canada. At the same time, the re­cip­i­ent of your gift re­ceives: a full-colour cer­tifi­cate high­light­ing your con­tri­bu­tion, which can be per­son­al­ized and is suit­able for framing; a lovely cal­en­dar with won­der­ful pho­tos of land­scapes and wildlife from across Canada; and a thank-you let­ter from John Lounds, NCC pres­i­dent and CEO.

See? Everybody wins.

This is the per­fect gift for some­one who has every­thing, or is hard to buy for. In this age of ram­pant con­sumerism, where we get stuff that we don’t need to store in spaces we don’t have, isn’t it time we started think­ing a lit­tle differently?

For more de­tails on, and to or­der, Gifts of Canadian Nature, click here.

And check out the so­cial me­dia re­lease on the NCC’s Forces of Nature cam­paign, fea­tur­ing Ryan Reynolds (with his shirt on, un­for­tu­nately), Denise Donlon and Jason Priestly.

And if some­one doesn’t ap­pre­ci­ate your gift of na­ture, then they’re a greedy, nature-hating grinch who should be crossed off your list.

(Disclosure: my friend and col­league, Andy Donovan, works on be­half of the Nature Conservancy of Canada. I also do some con­sult­ing for his com­pany, Donovan Consulting Group. So this post is hugely bi­ased. Which is okay, be­cause it re­ally is a great gift idea.)

He’s cute AND he loves nature!