On the 12^th day of Christmas, I present “Our ‘green’ Christmas”.

This year, I tried to green up our Christmas celebration.  I had been reading zero-waste and clutter-free blogs and ideas and I wanted to incorporate that as much as possible.

So here’s what it looked like:

Santa left these great stocking fillers – bamboo toothbrushes; character bandaids; chocolate; one ‘fun thing’; a punnet of favourite berries J.

Gifts - Made the Christmas meals the real celebration (opted out of the Christmas crackers) and reminded the children that gifts are to honour the baby Jesus, not to create excess and pollution.

• Whogivesacrap toilet paper (yes, one roll for everyone!!);
• at least one recycled gift per person (Le Crueset milk pan (from me to hubby), party dress, books, Dachshund bookends (hubby bought for me J), storage shelves in the shape of a London telephone box; toys for the puppy);
• everything wrapped in newspaper and prettied up with lots of ribbon from my collections (saved for re-use of course);
• gift bags all recycled from previously and saved again of course
• re-used our special, perpetual “with love from your family” gift tags (I made these last year J)

• Santa left his gift for our family covered in a blanket – clever man!  It was a slide for the cubby fort being built.
• emailed family and said they are welcome to not buy this year if they hadn’t already – and that if they preferred to gift the children some cash we would use it to visit a local fun park for a day (this email was appreciated as it takes pressure off us all);
• Some green gifts the children received included: stainless steel lunch box; eco-friendly skipping rope (recycled plastic handles and cotton rope); wool socks; seed growing kits.

Other green Christmas choices:

• our Christmas tree of course was a real one that we will put through the mulcher – bonus compost!
• We made another Christmas tree from a stack of books – Agatha Christie collection that was gifted to our eldest J. 

• I did buy some second-hand decorations from the Vinnies – I especially love our ‘new’ wreaths – one is gold cardboard with gold paper holly and the other someone’s home-made from grapevine J.
• Made sure we all had a supply of library books to keep us occupied and planned an afternoon walk and a lovely trip to the beach on Boxing Day.

And all years from now on will be more of the same J.

The Christmas cards I mailed out were hand-made by me.  (Dang, looks like I didn’t even get a photo of them – must get someone to send me a photo!).  Must incorporate some recycled element next year but at least nothing new was purchased.

And lastly, my Secret Santa gift for a work colleague even incorporated some recycling – all decorations from my stash J.