Be Eco-Friendly This Holiday Season!

Eco-Friendly Holidays

“True Meaning and True Practices”

Eco Holidays are about consciously choosing to simplify and satisfy while practicing good stewardship. It is about focusing on compassion versus consumption, people verses products, and respect the importance of accountability and it’s precedence over accumulation. Greening your holiday is about reducing the negative impact on the environment and increasing positive impact to your experiences. Our practices during the holidays should be more important than the products received during the holidays. By simplifying what we do and how we do it, we are better able to enjoy the journey of sharing the holidays with loved ones.

Make Your Holiday Ideas Sustainable

A sustainable holiday is one that holds meaning to us as we enjoy and prioritize what is most important to us - be it a spiritual ritual or a tradition and memory making practice.

·         Identify Waste: Seek alternatives to things that cause waste. This includes our money, our time and the impact of the environment.

·         Involve Others: Practice “Creative Collaborative Networking” during the holidays. Engage each other’s resources, energies and talents in preparing for and enjoying the holidays.

Eco-Friendly Gifts: Your Green Gift Giving Guide

Choose eco-friendly gifts that are resourceful, conscientious and creative. They are affordable, unique and giving with thought is more eco responsible and meaningful than trendy.

Scale Down

Ask yourself these questions before shopping for eco-friendly gifts: Whom do you really need to buy for? How much do you really need to spend? Do the presents you're buying have a purpose or meaning? As you ask yourself these questions and commit to scaling down, you will reduce unnecessary spending, waste, stress and feel the satisfaction in simplifying.

Quality, Not Quantity

Quality is more relevant than quantity every time. Avoid buying lots of inexpensive and poorly made items and opt for fewer quality items that will last longer, be useful and hold meaning to the recipient. We need to put more focus on relationships than materialism - meaning over matter.

Buy Local

Search thrift stores, antique stores, craft shows, swap meets, local listings, and seek out one-of-a-kind and locally made eco-friendly gifts. Online auctions and creative stores such as etsy showcases creative artists and works.

Don't Buy New

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure holds true. If you can find gifts that match your loved ones special interests and collections, hobbies and personal pursuits, your gift will have more meaning and used; secondhand, vintage, and antique items can be appropriately given to not only help with waste diversion, but add to your loved one’s treasure box of nostalgia and creative pursuits.

Homemade and Handmade

Green gift giving can be simple and meaningful. Try making homemade food, especially organic and healthy. For those wishing to cut back on unnecessary gift giving and wanting to practice healthy and natural lifestyles, make homemade trail mix, cut fruit bouquets, or give an indoor garden herb kit. Gather family and friends together for the afternoon and cook and prepare holiday trays together. Just be sure to check for allergies or dietary restrictions!

Can you draw, paint, make pottery, sew, crochet or knit, take nice photos, make scrapbooks, darling crafts or share some other talent such as a musical ability through your holiday gift giving? Host a craft night or a holiday talent show and make one-of-a-kind eco-friendly gifts or entertain with creativity as a gift for your friends and family!

Sustainable Materials

Eco-friendly gifts should avoid plastics, polyesters, hardwoods or any other non-sustainable materials. Opt instead for cotton, bamboo, wool, etc. Try to find organic when possible and for non-toxic paints on things.

Give the Gift of Charity

For the real “hard to shop for” person on your list, donate money, plant a tree, or support their favorite church or charitable organization in their name or give a gift certificate to a local garden store, or buy a membership to the local zoo, botanical garden or art museum.

Educate

Green gift giving can include buying things that are green, and buying things that teach green. Perhaps a vegetable gardening book accompanied by a few garden tools and seeds, an air purifying indoor plant accompanied by a book about botany, a nature gift basket with binoculars, a nature journal and an outdoor guide book.