What’s on your gift list this year? If there’s a video game console, a bigger TV, a bottle of designer perfume, or all of the above about to take chunks out of your bank account, you may already be thinking of making a trip to tax-free New Hampshire to do your holiday shopping. Our next-door neighbors over there make it a point to live free or die, and when it comes to refusing to pay $1.65 for a buck-fifty candy bar, they do not fail (nor does the Granite State exact a tax on earned wages). Only the frigid and remote Alaska can also boast both benefits to the average shopper. It can sound like a foreign concept, even as close by as we Portlanders are. Well, it’s about to get even more exotic.

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