Happy Holidays from our family to yours. As we have approached Christmas and our pending reveal of the new look and name of our blog we have been writing less and preparing more and spending more time with our children.
I hope that all of you, our readers, are spending this time with your families and enjoying their company.
Presents Wrapped in Newspapers
Holidays with our family is always a lot of push and pull. Some of our relatives think we’re very overboard on the environmental concerns, some are very supportive and some think we don’t go far enough. Some relatives are so supportive of our trying to be green that their efforts occasionally make other members of the family a little crazy. We try not to push too hard when we’re at someone else’s house, even when it is the house I grew up in, because there are always a lot of people trying to live under one roof when we are here. (My mom has a large house and we often have 10-15 people staying here at one time during the holidays.)
This year I’m thrilled that everyone made efforts to make our Christmas more green to the extent that I was the least green of all the people that wrapped gifts!
Three different ways that people were green when wrapping gifts:
- Jon’s mom wrapped presents in newspaper.
- Alicia’s mom put presents in gift bags reclaimed from last Christmas and throughout the year.
- Jon wrapped presents in packing material that some of our mail-ordered gifts came in.
Presents in gift bags
In our house, Alicia and Santa were pretty much the only ones that used new wrapping paper. They didn’t go out and buy it though, they used some of the paper that had accumulated at her mother’s house from various sources and fundraisers over the past year or two.
Merry Christmas
Alicia & Jon
Decades ago (like in the late 70’s or early 80’s) my mom used remnants of scrap fabric to make a bunch of large fabric gift bags in various holidayish colors, and she’s been using them ever since. The bags are very simple, like pillowcases, and there are accompanying ties made of various ribbon-like decorative trims. The to/from tags are commercially made, but even those get reused year after year. After gifts are opened, the bags are gathered and stored away for next year.