The thing is I generally like the festive season. It can sometimes get stressful, but it brings a lot of excitement and positive things (e.g. my children get dressed in record time so they can get downstairs and open their advent calendars) and for the kids it is an amazing month. So my challenge is how to make this a green Christmas (chances of a white Christmas are very slim anyway thanks to global warming...). How do I make this season slightly less excessive without turning in to the Grinch?
If looking around for advice on the Net the information you get is actually quite similar to normal green behaviour, e.g. recycle as much as possible, plan you food (you don't actually need to buy double the normal amount of food, nobody will be going hungry anyway), buy local, compost all your vegetable peels, avoid disposable plates and cups (if you are short get some from the charity shop or borrow from your neighbour), choose cards made from recycled paper or better still send e-cards, think about your wrapping etc. I haven't really come across anything groundbreaking or exciting that totally grabbed my attention and made me go 'of course - I should have thought of that!'
So unfortunately I have had to do a bit of thinking(!) to figure out the best ways to green up our christmas. Where can we make improvements that won't spoil the christmas spirit? This is what I have come up with so far:
- We are not buying any new decorations. We already have quite a collection, but if we need additions we will have to make them ourselves! (I have actually broken this rule already, because I have ordered a wreath for the door, but it is made locally from locally sourced holly that can be composted afterwards, so I am almost excused)
- Use of wrapping paper will have to be minimised. Apparently we use 8000 tonnes of wrapping paper every year, equivalent to approx 50.000 trees - that is a lot. These are the solutions I have come up with so far: I am going to wrap most presents in material. I have dug out old curtains, old table covers etc and I am going to cut them into nice pieces and use them for wrapping presents. After the mayhem on Christmas morning I can then gather all the pieces, fold them up and put them in the christmas box ready for next year! I have even experimented with sewing gift bags for the items that are likely to reoccur, such as CDs and DVDs.
- Another thing I have tried out is using empty boxes from the kitchen, e.g. cereal boxes, tea boxes. If you open the sides gently you can turn them inside out, glue them back together and you then have a nice plain box ready to be decorated and filled with presents - it actually works. Sure enough this takes a bit longer than wrapping with paper, so not very appealing for my lazy side, but once I got going it was quite fun and my daughter was very happy to join in.
- Admittedly some presents will have to be wrapped in paper - my five year old just might get suspecious if Santa's present is wrapped in the old table cover- but my target is not to need to buy Christmas wrapping paper for the next 10 years. Thanks to the previous owners of the house we have a decent supply (I think they forgot to look in the attic), and I am going to work on my skills to wrap presents without using sellotape, so that I can collect most of the paper back and reuse it next year.
- I have ordered a turkey from the local farm shop - yes I finally found a shop. Well strictly speaking I haven't found it yet, because I placed the order over the phone and I am yet to venture out and find the actual building, but the risk of a Christmas without a turkey should be enough incentive to get me there. Hopefully I will also be able to get some of the other food from there, in order to make it a more local christmas.
- I think I have managed to convince the family that we can get DIY crackers and fill them with edible stuff rather than getting another collection of plastic gimmicks. OK, crackers in general are probably still a bit on the wasteful side, but at least the content can disappear into our tummies rather than the bin. Somebody should invent a reusable cracker, then you could just put a new filling in every year.
- There will be a proper cover on the table rather than a paper one. I have never used disposable plates etc for Christmas, but for several years I have bought paper covers, because I didn't have anything that fitted the table properly. I have now spent £20 on buying a piece of Christmas material, which I can hopefully use for many years to come - this is called long term investment!
We will however still be sending christmas cards out. There is not much point in sending e-cards to elderly relatives with no computer and my daughter is unlikely to accept sending e-mails to her friends when everybody else are swopping cards, but maybe over time we can bring the numbers down. Maybe I should get my daughter to do her own cards from some recycled paper?(I might also include a reminder for people to recycle their card afterwards...)
What I probably won't do this Christmas is go back to the library for a loan of a smart meter - it would be heart breaking to see how much energy is actually used. I wonder how much money the councils spend on Christmas lights in December - it can't be cheap?!
Does all this make our Christmas green? I don't know, but at least I am trying and if nothing else some of the above things should be saving us a little bit of money. I am sure there are lots of other things I could do, but Christmas is all about traditions and we can't really make new traditions in just one year - so this is a start.
I wish you all a happy green Christmas!
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