A Conscientious Christmas

The holiday season is full of warmth, but also a lot of stressors in multiple aspects of our lives. It feels like this time of year always brings with it an inevitable draining of our wallets and the purchase of items that will ultimately go to waste. Excess food and drink. Extra wrapping scraps. Gifts that get used for maybe a week and end up in the back of a closet or settled on a forgotten shelf.

Finding ways to limit the wastefulness of holidays is not only good for your finances, but for the planet as well.

Global warming is taking its toll on the world, whether we all want to admit to it or not. The last thing we need is to add more garbage to the land. By reusing and recycling items from past holidays, being smart about planning our meals, and careful about our gift giving, we can help the planet even a little bit.

Reusing and Recycling:

I started a strange collection when I was a child. I would collect all the shiny bows that were stuck on top of presents and keep them rather than let them be thrown away. Now as an adult, I keep the bows for another reason: to reuse them. All it takes is a glue stick or a bit of tape to give these bows back their stickiness, and this keeps them from being wasted each year. And keeps you from having to purchase new ones each year.

Another way to recycle for gifting comes from whether you or someone you know still gets a physical newspaper delivered and then gets rid of it after reading. Ask to keep these old newspapers. They make a good replacement for tissue paper in gift bags and are great for padding any packages you're sending through the mail. Also the comics sections make for good gift wrapping.

Avoiding Food Waste:

The most important part to avoiding food waste is figuring out exactly how much you need of each item before you shop to prevent purchasing excess out of panic or uncertainty.

The next step would be to find uses for any food excess you end up with. Extra chocolate from making candy? Melt it down for some chocolate covered strawberries and bananas. Make some homemade hot chocolate. If you have unopened food items and no other use for them, donate them to a local food pantry. They would be glad to take your excess so that those less fortunate can make use of it.

Finally, if you can go without it as a tradition, avoid decorating your tree with food items. After you make that DIY popcorn garland or dried citrus garland, it ends up in the garbage. It won't stay for next year, and while it might look nice on the tree, it is an unnecessary decoration.

Gift Giving:

This is the most difficult area to be conscientious in. For some people, finding the right gifts is an already impossible part of the holidays, to also make it frugal and Earth-friendly makes it even harder.

My best advice is to get something you know will be put to use. Clothes that can be passed down after they're outgrown or toys that can be donated once the children receiving them for Christmas have moved onto their next phase of interests.

Another interesting thing to note is that some places allow you to refill gift cards that you've used. If you have some gift cards laying around, reload them with some money and put them in stockings rather than throwing them away.

It's difficult to take care of the planet in the middle of the holiday stress, but every little effort helps.