Are you looking at a sea of holiday trappings that are still sloshing around your home five days after Christmas? Are you wondering what to do with it all and whether there might be a simpler, less wasteful and more earth-friendly way to celebrate in Christmases Future? Well, you’ve come to the right place.
We’ve been wondering about just those things (even with the efforts we made this year to rein in holiday waste and green up our celebrations) and have come up with our 3 R’s of Christmas Past: ideas for Reusing and Recycling holiday greeting cards, Christmas trees, wrapping paper and ribbons. And some thoughts on Rethinking next year’s celebrations too.
So if there still is gift wrap crumpled in a corner behind the tree or holiday cards propped on your mantel destined for the trash, wait just one pretty minute and keep reading before you send all those festive holdouts to some landfill.
RETHINK
Resist buying gift wrap and ribbon at end-of-year sales. Instead, think about how you can reduce wrapping or use recycled materials, such as the Sunday funnies or children’s artwork, next year. Or make fabric gift bags that can be reused from year to year, as they are in Lois Morrison’s family and that of reader Helen Norton of Park Forest. (You also can buy reusable fabric gift bags from online sources such as reusablebags.com.) Or wrap presents in cloth bags that can be reused for groceries.
REUSE/RECYCLE
Next year, think about reusing a good-size houseplant (we used our Norfolk pine) as your holiday tree. And decorate it with ornaments made from cards you’ve received this year. We made this one after seeing the idea in the December/January 1998 Martha Stewart Living magazine. The ornament reminds us of patchwork quilts made from old clothes or sewing scraps — each facet a reminder of a friend or family member. We added a dangling tag that tells us the year we got the cards and made the ornament.
RECYLE
Each year, baiduhai Deputy Metropolitan Editor Peter Kendall cuts a foot-long section of the trunk of his family’s Christmas tree. He puts it away for a year to dry out and then uses a lathe to turn it into a candlestick. He inserts a metal candle cup for safety. (No lathe? A simple turned candlestick would be a good beginner project; woodworking classes are at Chicago’s Horner Park and some community colleges.)
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Keeping holiday frills out of landfills
Reuse
1. Save good, sturdy gift boxes to reuse next year. Nest them for compact storage. Stamped with store logos? You can fold and tape salvaged holiday paper over just the box’s top to make a “Hollywood box” (the kind TV prop masters make so characters can unwrap a present by simply lifting the top off the box).
2. Next year, think silver and gold — and white and blue and red. Instead of investing in a lot of new decorations, consider everything in the house that’s silver, gold, white, red and even blue as a potential decoration. Pull it all out and have fun with creating festive, sparkly vignettes. A silver champagne bucket, for example, becomes the container for a potted amaryllis. Create a long line of white ironstone on your fireplace mantel. Got red quilts or bedding? Put it on all the beds and drape over sofas and ottomans.
3. Buy fancy gift-wrap ribbon that’s on sale now; it can be used over and over again for years to come. Honestly, does anyone really like those ready-made bows with sticky backs? Fabric ribbon gives your gifts panache and holds up to repeated reuses, so when the wrapping comes off at your house, roll or fold up the ribbons and tuck them away for next year. With any luck, you’ll start a trend among your friends and family, and start adding to your ribbon stash each year.
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Recycle
1. Don’t throw out the cards you receive, make an ornament — Part 2 (see Part 1 on our cover). Another patchwork ornament — this one made with the same circles cut from old cards. Fold the circles in half, scoring with a bone folder or a sturdy plastic knife. Glue one half to another cutout circle half. Repeat until 10 circles have been glued together. Add floss or string to hang.
2. Don’t throw out the cards you receive, make an ornament — Part 3. This idea is adapted from the files of the hip do-it-yourself team at design*sponge (designspongeonline.com), which used card stock instead of recycled cards. (See accompanying story for instructions.)
3. Don’t throw out the cards you receive, make a wreath. Yes, we’re on a cutup-Christmas card jag here. Cut more circles and adorn a circular form. (See accompanying story for instructions.)
4. Don’t throw out the cards you receive, reuse them by turning them into gift tags, like the family of Chicago’s Lois Morrison. Cut them into rectangles, squares or circles and write on the back; you can use scalloped-edge or other decorative-edge scissors if you have them.
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5. Recycle your Christmas tree. In Chicago, chippers will be at work at 23 parks from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Jan. 12; if you turn in a tree early you will have a chance at a compact fluorescent light bulb or reusable water bottle. Suburbs’ tree disposal plans vary; check with your village hall for tree recycling plans. Fragrant shredded trees can be spread as mulch on beds or under shrubs. You also can strip boughs from your tree and lay them over beds to insulate perennials from sprouting in treacherous late-winter freezes.
6. Or set your Christmas tree up in the back yard and hang fruit and seed-covered ornaments on it for the birds. (Save the pine cones from your Christmas decorations. Smear them with peanut butter, roll in birdseed and hang on the tree.)
7. Find better ways to dispose of packaging. Mailing stores may welcome plastic foam peanuts. Reader Harry Drucker’s family takes foam packing blocks to a local hardware store, which reuses them.
8. Find crafty uses for old wrapping paper and packaging. If there’s a kid around the house, he or she will welcome bits and scraps of wrap, cardboard tubes, even sturdy gift boxes for school projects and crafts. Tuck it all into a box or bin with some scissors and glue, and think how blissfully occupied they’ll be during winter’s shut-in days.
Rethink
Rethinking doesn’t mean rejecting Christmas traditions. But it does mean focusing on those traditions that mean the most. And, maybe, even creating some new ones. We may find, thinking back, that the things that gave us the greatest joy this year had little to do with getting stuff.
Maybe it was when a 3-year-old decorated his first colorful smear of a cookie or when the grandparents arrived. Perhaps it was the pride you took in making a simple gift or when you savored the taste of peanut brittle or lutefisk or green bean casserole or whatever dish appears in your family only at the holiday. Maybe it was the moment when you stood in a darkened church, holding a candle, surrounding by candlelight, singing “Silent Night.”
“When I was a boy,” writes environmentalist Bill McKibbon, “I never wanted to let go of that moment.”
The title of McKibbon’s 1998 book, “Hundred Dollar Holiday” (Simon & Schuster, 96 pages, $12) is “more of a target than a mandate,” he says. The book — still in print nearly 10 years later — is an extended essay about re-centering Christmas on family, friends, music, food, nature, love, service and faith to reduce the pressure as well as the waste and emissions produced when the holiday is all about getting and spending.
Setting a budget gives you a framework for figuring out how to make changes. “It’s a real spur to creativity,” McKibbon says, “and creativity is good.”
In McKibbon’s family, gifts are handmade. Drucker, on the board of the Environmental Law and Policy Center in Chicago, says his Wilmette family of five tries to give things that will be used up, such as flavored olive oil or wine, or experiences, such as theater or concert tickets. Lois Morrison of Chicago, director of the Great Lakes Program Office of the Nature Conservancy, says her extended family saves all the Christmas cards they receive to reuse as gift tags. This year, she collected the artwork churned out by her daughters Josephine, 5, and Addie, 3 1/2, to use for holiday decorations and as wrapping paper. And she is grateful, she says, for the example of an uncle who, when she was a child, gave gifts to charity in her name.
If you are ready to rethink Christmas in ways large or small, now is the time to do it, while the memories are fresh. If you’d like to propose changes in your family’s customs or the gift-giving routine, it’s a good idea to have those discussions soon. Some people shop for Christmas all year long and won’t appreciate it if you try to change the rules of the game in October.
And, McKibbon says, don’t be surprised if it takes a while to reset your family’s expectations of Christmas. Leading by example tends to go over better than preaching. “Traditions are hard to change,” Morrison says. “But over time they do evolve.”
Even small steps can make a difference and there’s no time like the present to get started. Here are some tips that may make next year’s holidays greener and richer.
1. During gift-opening time in future years, resolve to gather all wrapping paper (keeping bows and ribbon separate); roll large pieces of gift wrap around a cardboard tube for reuse or, if recycling, fold to put into the recycling bin. Gift wrap also can be shredded to be saved for packing.
2. Think about how you can reduce paper gift wrap or use recycled materials, such as the Sunday funnies or children’s artwork, next year. Or make fabric gift bags (holiday-print fabrics are on sale now) that can be reused from year to year, as they are in Morrison’s family and that of reader Helen Norton of Park Forest. “Whoever gets it, recycles it and gives it again,” says Morrison. “It’s very festive.” Or wrap presents in cloth bags that can be reused for groceries.
3. Call it a wrap on gift-wrapping. Growing up, my Christmas presents were never wrapped, says Home&Garden reporter Shaila Wunderlich. With six children to worry about, my mother’s motivation was more a matter of sanity than sustainability, but in this case, it’s the outcome that counts. Before we went to bed on Christmas Eve, my five sisters and I would decorate place cards and place each of our cards where we wanted Santa to put our gifts. The next morning, much pomp and circumstance was made out of waiting for our father’s signal that it was OK to enter the room where our gifts were displayed. After rushing to each of our spots and cooing over our “pile,” we would make a circuit around the room for a show-and-tell of each sister’s gifts.
4. Consider the beauty of an e-card. Home&Garden assistant editor Cindy Dampier says you can create a simple e-card by making a pdf file and e-mailing (we had great results using Power Point templates) or creating a gallery to share at one of the online photo sites. Either way, you can customize with your own family or wintry photos (how about a shot of your snow-covered back yard?) and creative type. And here’s the best benefit of all: when you e-mail a card, you often get instant replies from family and friends.
5. If you didn’t do it this year, consider reducing the holiday light display next year to save energy. Or switch to LEDs, as the Drucker family did. Or both. New York’s Rockefeller Center Christmas tree switched to LED lights in 2007 to use 63 percent less energy, saving enough electricity in a day to power a single-family home for a month. Less power used means less coal burned and fewer greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
6. Think of gifts that won’t end up in landfills. Give experiences, like the Druckers, such as theater or concert tickets, classes, museum memberships, gift certificates for massages. Give gardeners gift certificates to a garden center or mail-order plant or seed catalog. Some families, like Lois Morrison’s uncle’s, make charitable contributions in each others’ names.
7. Buy as many things as possible that are locally made or grown to reduce emissions from transporting goods.
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Christmas-card ornament — 1
Thanks to Martha Stewart Living magazine for this idea.
Instructions:
1. Cut out 20 circles from old cards. (You can make different size ornaments by varying size of circles. You can trace circles with a small can and cut them out with scissors or, use 1 1/2-inch and 2-inch circle hole punchers.) Cut out one more circle and, inside this circle, draw an equilateral triangle. Cut out the triangle.
2. Trace and score the triangle inside each circle. Fold up along the lines of the triangle.
3. Glue flaps from 5 circles together, all with triangle points up. This is your top. Repeat with another 5 circles for the bottom.
4. Glue flaps from 10 circles, alternating triangle points up and down. This is your midsection (shown in foreground).
5. Glue ends of midsection together to form a circle.
6. Glue flaps from top to flaps on top of the midsection. Glue flaps from bottom of midsection to flaps from the bottom piece.
7. Cut a piece of string or floss about 6 inches long. Fold it in half and knot the two loose ends together. Affix the knotted end to the ornament with a glue gun.
8. Voila. (Shown on cover: You also can cut 2 rectangles from some remaining cards. On the blank side of the card stock , write the year; on the other rectangle, write the name of the ornament-maker. Gue the rectangles together with the floss/string in between. Then hot-glue the floss/string to the bottom of the ornament.)
Christmas-card ornament — 2
This idea is adapted from the files of the hip do-it-yourself team at design*sponge (designspongeonline.com).
Instructions:
1. Choose 3 cards; think color schemes when choosing.
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2. Cut cards into 7 strips: two 6 inches long and one 4 1/2 inches long from first card; two 5 inches long from second card; two 5 1/2 inches long from third card.
3. Stack the strips in concentric order: shortest at the center, longest strips on the top and bottom of the stack.
4. Make sure all the top edges of the strips are flush, then staple them together. Then line up the bottom ends so that they are flush and staple that end.
5. Add fishing line, thread or string for hanging.
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The 3 Rs of Christmas Past
Christmas-card wreath
More things to do with circles cut from old greeting cards.
Instructions:
1. Cut circles out of the Christmas cards you’ve received. (You could also throw in a few circles cut from favorite holiday photos.)
2. Get a plastic foam wreath form from a crafts store or cut out a 3-inch-wide wreath form from stiff cardboard. Arrange cut-out circles of varying sizes in an attractive overlapped arrangement over the wreath form.
We started with a base of the largest circles laid about an inch apart; glue circles down (we used a low-temperature glue gun so as not to melt the plastic foam). Add other circles of varying sizes; we glued some to water bottle caps to add dimension.
3. Line the inner and outer edge of the plastic foam form with used ribbon. And, lastly, use the glue gun to add a bow saved from a recently opened gift.
4. Optional: For hanging, get about 1 foot of used ribbon. Make a knot in each end. Break a paper clip in half and use each piece like a floral pick to hold the knotted ends of ribbon down about 2 inches to the left and to the right of the center.