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Greening up your Christmas holidays 10 tips to green up your Christmas holidays.
1. Solar powered LED christmas lights. These lights are fully self sustaining, and come on automatically when it gets dark. They have a solar panel and rechargeable batteries, with various sizes of light strings. They range from $20 to $60 depending on the size of the light string.
2. Use a smaller indoor live tree to decorate. Don’t buy a cut tree or a fake plastic tree when you can just go out to the local nursery and buy a live potted evergreen. It will cost about the same as you would pay for plastic or cut trees.
3. Choose 100% recycled wrapping paper or paper made from hemp, rice or any other tree friendly source. Many products even come printed with soy based ink, instead of petroleum based ink.
4. Avoid buying toys that require batteries. If they do use batteries, then buy rechargeable batteries with a charger. Also avoid toys made of harmful plastics, and paints. Some Simple Toys are the best toys, like wooden blocks, hockey sticks and sleds.
5. Make decorations for your house and tree yourself. Use recycled and reused items, and find things in nature like pinecones, evergreen shoots, and berries. This can be tons of family fun, and very low cost.
6. Walk, use public transportation, or carpool to get around. Take a bus to the mall for 
shopping. Carpool to parties and family functions.
7. For your holiday feasts choose food that are organic, fair trade, local, and with less packaging. Buy local grown produce if you can. Organic food is healthier and it tastes better.
8. Make gifts for people yourself, in your kitchen. People love getting jars of jam, salsa and other preserves. Baked goods, and fruit baskets also make an excellent gift. Ingredients can be fair trade, organic, and also bought in bulk to reduce packaging. These gifts can all be packaged in jars or baskets, which can be reused. Tea towels can be used for gift wrap instead of paper or bags.
9. Give gifts in reusable shopping bags, tied off with a ribbon. This is like a double gift, because now the bag can be used by the recipient for years to come, helping that person be eco-friendly too.
10. Last but not least remember what Christmas is really about. Family, friends and celebration with the ones you love. It doesn’t have to be a commercial blitz to spend and consume. If we all keep this in mind it will be an eco-friendly holiday season for all.
MERRY GREEN CHRISTMAS TO ALL!
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One of my buddies is always talking about your blog at work – finally came and checked it out today, nice work! I’m subscribing to your rss feed – keep on posting!
thanks for stopping by ultra green! Glad your enjoy it!
Hey Dave,
Good tips, all! My roommate told me a good one the other day, too…
His family keeps the previous year’s received cards, and cuts them into pieces to use as tags on gifts. Takes care of the, “what to do with all these old cards,” dilemma. And makes for decorative tags!
Hey Gen!
Nice to hear from ya! Thats is definitely a great tip! Thanks your roomie for me will ya!
Dave
ooo, I like the solar powered christmas lights – and the buying toys that don’t require batteries. I might suggest that a little alternative giving could go a long way… donating in somebody’s name instead of buying them a Widget. Also, using you’re Brighter Planet card as well.
There’s a great discussion about the application of alternative economics over at economixt, they’re talking about the brighter planet card there as well:
http://www.economixt.com/2008/12/do-good-credit-cards-the-brighter-planet-case/
Very nice and useful article. Good tips. I got your blog from a directory and find it very cool. I will re-visit after a while.
How about a #3A:
Recycle everything and anything that you can during the holiday season. During a typical week, I will fill a standard garbage can full of paper for recycling. I managed to fill at least 3 cans during the week of Christmas by recycling all the wrapping paper, toy packaging, clothing boxes and food containers that either came through my house or that I brought home from other houses that I visted on Xmas Eve and Xmas day.
Granted – this is a downstream effort, but it can be impactful nonetheless.
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