Fresh green Christmas links

Hi gang! I haven’t been in the mood for looking through the news this week, so I decided that this week’s links list was going to be all about eco-friendly things you can do to make your Christmas greener. Much more fun!

Firstly, I still stand by what I wrote a few years ago about Christmas: imagine what your ideal, meaningful and fun Christmas celebration would look like, make a plan to achieve it without last-minute rushing, and ruthlessly skip anything that doesn’t match your vision, even if other people object : )

This week I’ve seen a lot of green Christmas crafts for decorating your home festively. If you’ve seen or done anything similar, please let us all know in the comments…

Wendy from My Green Australia has some great ideas for holiday decorations that reduce, reuse or recycle.

Tricia at Little Eco Footprints has a twist on the advent calendar: 24 nature play and eco craft activities for kids.

Re-Nest has 10 DIY wreaths made using what you already have. Very pretty! They’ve also got great gift-wrapping suggestions, and some very useful tips for staying stress-free in the holiday season.

Finally, if you’re too busy for crafting, why not enter How Big Is Your Eco?’s competition to win some beautiful eco-friendly decorations from Polli.

Green Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day can be a greenie’s nightmare, like any other event that’s become commercialised. There’s a lot of hype and advertising pushing for us all to buy more things to prove we love each other, and if I see one more ugly stuffed toy holding a heart, I think I’ll go mad!

But I still like to celebrate it anyway. I like the little reminder not to take a relationship for granted, and usually take the opportunity to do something simple with my husband. So what can you do for Valentine’s Day that doesn’t mean abandoning your greenie cred?

The same gift-giving principles I wrote about at Christmas apply here too. Think about what your sweetie likes; choose long-lasting quality items rather than disposable, over-packaged ones; and try to go for organic, free-range, fair-trade, and local wherever possible. As always, skipping the material gifts is an option – instead of spending money, spend time with your honey instead. So what are some green Valentines ideas? Sticking to the traditional V-day gifts, here’s what I was able to come up with:

Gifts

Chocolate: Green & Blacks and Dagoba are my favourite organic, fair-trade brands of chocolate, but there are plenty of tasty ones to choose from.

Flowers: I couldn’t find any organically-grown flowers from the major delivery services in Australia, but native arrangements are available here and here. You can ask growers at your local farmers market what their methods are, and know that at least the flowers haven’t been trucked all over the place in cold-storage. If you’ve got green thumbs, why not pick a bunch from your own garden?

Wine: there are so many organic wines available now! Check out Organicwine.com.au to find one from your region.

Diamonds or jewellery: We’re often pushed to buy diamonds for Valentine’s Day, but many of them are mined and sold to fund terrorist and criminal activities. If you do want to buy a diamond, look for conflict-free diamonds certified by the Kimberley process – Lighter Footstep blog tells you how to find out the source of diamonds. As a cooler and less traditional alternative, look into lab-created diamonds (no mining involved), or buy non-diamond jewellery from independent Australian designers like those at Modamuse or Etsy.

Cards: I’m sure there are plenty of great cards out there, but this year I’m going to get some recycled printer paper, and use it to make cards from the many free designs available online as downloads. Here’s what I’ve found so far: Samantha Hahn at Flickr, Natala at Flickr (front and inside), Organic Consumers (right-hand column), vintage kid’s cards from ValArt2008 at Flickr. Or, if you want to send a valentine to your favourite vegan or the IPCC, check out the Valentine e-cards from Grist.org .

Activities

Food: Maybe I’m just greedy, but sharing a meal with the one I love is my favourite way to celebrate Valentines Day. You could try a vegetarian restaurant, or cook an all-organic meal at home. My ideal V-day menu would be a free-range chicken from Mt Barker, roasted with local organic vegetables from the Swansea St markets; some organic wine from Serventy or Random Valley; and fresh fruit with local cream from Casa Dairy.

Help out: Do something nice for your loved one – Apartment Therapy suggests taking care of an annoying task they’ve been putting off! As the first commenter on the article points out, nothing says “I love you” better than cleaning the toilet

Go out together: Gifts are lovely, but can’t replace spending time with your loved one, doing your favourite activity or trying something new. Picnics are fun and low-key, or you could see a movie together. Or you could change your routine and challenge yourselves, so you can rediscover what it is you enjoy about spending time with this person.

Stay in together: Of course, you don’t have to go out of the house… get some beeswax candles, some massage oil, find those chocolates and wine from earlier, and see if you can entertain each other for a while

That said, don’t forget your other loved ones for Valentines Day. Send a card to your grandparents, take your mum out to dinner, give your best friend flowers. Or take your cue from Clare at Ockham’s Razor, and celebrate Library Lover’s Day instead. There’s all sorts of love in the world, and all of it should be celebrated!

So: have you ever given an eco-friendly Valentine? Or have you got any good ideas for one? Share the love by leaving a comment about it!

Dreaming of a green Christmas: gift ideas

Last time I went through some ways you can choose greener Christmas gifts. Today I’m listing my favourite green gifts! All of these products are things I’ve either given, received, would like to give or would like to receive myself.

I’m a bibliophile, so my favourite place to do Christmas shopping is in a bookstore. Kids love Graeme Base’s books (remember Animalia?). He’s written a couple with environmental messages: Uno’s Garden is a story, a maths puzzle and shows us how we change our environments (and how there’s always time to fix our mistakes!); The Waterhole is a counting book with a story about sharing our common resources. Younger kids like the beautiful pictures by Base, and as they get older they enjoy the secret puzzles hidden inside.

For adults who want to read about how to live sustainably, I recommend Greeniology by Tania Ha. I was going to write a review of it, but I’ve lent it out to people who are enjoying it too much to return it! It’s a fun and practical guide for the millions of Aussies living in our cities who want to reduce their environmental impact.

Getting away from the bookshops and into the great outdoors a little… when my nephews and nieces are a little older, I’m going to adopt an endangered animal for them at Perth Zoo. Other ideas include buying paw prints and going on behind-the-scenes tours, with profits going to help the zoos rescue endangered species in our region. But for now I’ll be getting my nieces some Anamalz instead.

While we’re still outside, you can try a fair-trade football; Sigg re-useable water bottles; or a wind-up torch and emergency phone charger .

Around the home I like the Ripple gift pack (the one with the duckie that’s a shower-timer!); Stuffit reuseable bags in a 3 pack; or Candelas for energy-efficient mood lighting (we received these as a wedding gift and love them!)

In the kitchen, I’m a big fan of seasonal cooking. A book of recipes organised by ingredient or season rather than by meal plan can be a winner – it makes it easier to find something to do with that unusual vegetable you picked up at the markets. I like Stephanie Alexander’s The Cooks’ Companion (another wedding present), but there’s plenty of them out there.

And you can’t go too far wrong with food. There’s a huge range of organic, fair-trade and sustainable chocolates, coffee, tea, wine, olive oil, native jams and spices and so on – a quick trip around your local supermarket will find you some, and most eco-shops have a great range.

Finally, if you’re short on time but want to make sure you give a nice gift, have a look at Biome’s hampers. I won one earlier in the year, and was really impressed with it! They’ve got a huge range, with food, pampering and kids versions, and will deliver around Australia.

Dreaming of a green Christmas: gift-giving

Gift-giving has the potential to be the most eco-unfriendly part of Christmas – there’s the driving to and from the shops, the pressure to buy quantity instead of quality, the potential to choose the wrong gift if you’re in a rush or buying for people you don’t know well, which leads to wasted resources as those gifts end up gathering dust or thrown out.

But thinking green not only reduces the environmental impact of your gifts, it can also make the whole process a lot easier on everyone. You can go green by choosing gifts with various environmentally-friendly labels on them, but it’s not the only way…

Do’s and Don’ts

• Think before you buy: consider the person you’re giving the gift to, and find out their hobbies, their passions, and general tastes before making a decision about something you’d like to get them. It cuts the time you spend haunting the shops wondering if they’d prefer a singing Santa or a new fairy-floss maker, and it reduces the chance of you buying them an unwanted gift.
• Remember your general green principles: less is more; reduce, reuse, recycle; buy local, sustainable, organic, or all three if you can.
• Don’t buy disposable things, avoid toxic plastics (PVC) and over-packaged products.
• Plan your shopping trip so you can be as efficient as possible. It saves time, causes less car-pollution, and frees up a parking space for someone else on the days you’re sitting at home listening to carols
• Let your fingers do the walking: order gifts over the phone or online, to be delivered to you through the post.
• If you don’t know the person well enough to know what they’d like, don’t buy them a gift! Will they notice if you don’t? If so, consider a gift certificate (not a green tip so much as a time-saving one!).

So how else can you make your gift-giving greener?
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Dreaming of a green Christmas: cards and wrappings

Cards and gift-wrappings are an area where you can make a huge difference to your eco-friendly Christmas. The usual way is to buy rolls of Christmas paper, maybe ribbons and tags as well, to wrap all your gifts in, while sending out dozens of cards to all your friends, family and co-workers. By following the reduce-reuse-recycle mantra, you can really make this part of Christmas a lot greener.

Reduce

Does everyone you know need a card? I don’t send cards to people I’ll be seeing frequently over the period – I’m going to be celebrating with them anyway, they don’t need a card when I can give them a big hug instead. I make an effort to send cards to friends and family living in other cities, but I also try to email or call them too, so we can have a longer exchange than there’s room for in a card.

Do your gifts really need to be wrapped? Some do, obviously, if they’re going to be sitting under a tree before being received, or you’re planning a surprise. But some gifts aren’t improved by wrapping. If it’s a very large gift, try hiding it somewhere and making a short treasure hunt for it instead of swathing it in rolls and rolls of paper. If you’re giving someone a plant, it probably looks best just as nature made it.

Reuse

Ok, so that you don’t think I’m turning into Scrooge here, there’s still a lot of cards and wrapping that you can’t reduce away. So what can you do?

My family is very good at re-using gift bags instead of wrapping paper. We tend to use them for the adults’ gifts, as the kids are more likely to peek to see what they’re getting! We started using them for birthdays, and saved them so that they now appear at Christmas as well. They come in all sizes and shapes, in lots of pretty patterns.

I’ve received gifts wrapped in newspaper, tied with red ribbon and looking great; I’ve also received gifts wrapped in the drawings my little cousins made at kindegarten – this is a great idea for doting relatives of your kids. I’ve also heard of people using large pages from calendars.

Alternatively, you can wrap a present in something that can be re-used in someone’s home, so that it becomes part of the gift: fabric is great for this, in the form of tea-towels, saris, sarongs, etc. Look at the Furoshiki (Japanese wrapping cloth) website for ways to wrap gifts with fabric.

Recycle

I’m not a fan of reusing cards that people have sent you, but you can buy cards made from recycled paper instead. Fund-raising cards from charities and non-profit organisations are more likely to use recycled paper than the bulk-packs of cards from supermarkets, but you never know so it’s best to check the small print on the back of the card. My favourites so far are the cards from the Red Cross I found a few years ago – made from recycled paper, with a recipe for Anzac biscuits on the back!

Re-using wrapping paper is a bit easier, especially if you’re a careful un-wrapper and the gift-giver isn’t too heavy on the sticky-tape. But careful hunting can sometimes find wrapping paper made from recycled materials – however, it’s harder to come by than recycled cards. If you’ve found some recycled card or paper, you can use them to make your own gift tags and avoid the mass-produced ones.

Other ways

Cards and wrapping are also an area where you can easily support fair-trade and community groups – Oxfam has a wide range (the surfing Santa above is just one example) and eco-friendly shops like Biome will also be able to help you out there.

And finally – tell your family and friends you don’t expect lots of cards or fancy wrappings on the gifts they give to you. Perhaps they’ve been wanting to cut back, but didn’t want to offend you by looking like they don’t care. Or maybe they’ve never thought about it before, but would be a bit relieved to have one item off their to-do list. Try telling the busiest person you know first, and give them some ideas from this article. If they get behind you, you’re more likely to convince other people in your group.