My Sister: The Eco-Warrior

Over the past couple of years, my younger sister has become more aware of how her spending habits have been affecting the planet. She has always been a fairly conscious person, keeping a keen eye on the news and looking around for a better understanding of the world around her. At times this has taken a dramatic turn, with her spending hours on end worrying about the state of the world - yet she comes out the other end stronger and with a solid ambition to help change the world in even the smallest ways she knows how.

One of these changes that she adopted a few years back was changing how she approaches Christmas.

The troubles of an indecisive shopper...

When it comes to making decisions, my sister isn't exactly the person to turn to. Many a time I've found her worrying herself over another choice that she is faced with, wanting to know what I think about each option only to ignore what I've said and go off for another hour of constant back and forth thinking.

Now, imagine this inability to make a clear choice mixed with the knowledge of buying Christmas presents for family members with very different personalities and likes. You'd think the solution would be to just stick to one simple present each - oh no, when it comes to presents Jodie much prefers to go all out, wanting to show each of us that she cares for us and wants to treat us to something nice.

I'm not sure when, but one Christmas her awareness of the impact we were having on the planet and her indecisive shopping habits soon converged. One phone call later and she had made me aware that she would be cutting back on her shopping choices at Christmas, wanting to avoid buying presents from big companies while simultaneously reducing the amount of plastic and wasted materials she used to wrap presents.

The eco-Christmas presents were born...

Once had come round to this way of thinking we started to receive our presents with much more simplistic wrapping. Gone were the days of shimmering paper adorned with Christmas paraphernalia, now our gifts came in brown packaging paper and colourful twine.

Honestly, I didn't really miss the old Christmas wrapping paper - it was great to receive presents with such a unique (at the time) wrapping. My sister being the creative that she is, had taken the time to paint a few snowflakes on my presents, mums were patterned with smiling snowmen. It made Christmas seem so much more rustic and warm, like Jodie had put a lot more effort into her wrapping.

It wasn't long before we were all influenced to follow suit. Now, rather than wandering round the shops looking for enough decorative wrapping paper, we use any packing paper we have available and add ribbons or twine that all gets stored away to be used next year.

Then the large companies fell behind...

Having conquered her ability to reduce the amount of waste in Christmas wrapping, Jodie soon turned her eyes on the actual gifts she was buying. I'll preface this section by saying that I think my sister has a shopping problem, the problem being she isn't capable of not buying stuff (I blame my mum for that habit).

This was a fairly recent change of perspective. Jodie had started talking about going to more charity shops and smaller businesses in order to find stuff for herself as well as future Christmas presents. This then came to fruition, soon enough our presents started to look less like everything we'd seen while doing our own online shopping and ended up with a more personalised touch.

One gift I always remember was a wonderful gift she gave me for my birthday (five days before Christmas so it still counted). It was a candle set that she had bought from Not on the Highstreet. Sounds very simple I know, but they were so beautifully made and came with small descriptions of things I'd achieved (didn't think she'd noticed them).

As the years have gone on our presents have continued to come from all sorts of different businesses. Jodie will search all the small stores she can find, going from charity shops to other small businesses looking for gifts that are more environmentally friendly, as well as offering that personal touch.

Taking lead from the youngest in the family...

Much like that wrapping paper, the rest of the our family have been taking lead from Jodie, looking elsewhere for more sustainable gifts. I'm rather thankful as I live in a city where there are so many charity shops and small businesses its rather hard to go through them all (see that blog post here).

This year I'm looking to make most of my presents more eco-friendly (and vegan friendly for the beauty lovers in the family). It won't be perfect, but this is the one way my family and I do our bit to help make the world a better place.