I'll Have A Green Christmas

I was sitting in the afterglow of Christmas surrounded by a mountain of used Christmas paper. As I looked at the mountain of paper destined for the trash bin, I wondered what could I do next year to be greener.
I really am trying to shrink my carbon footprint and be as green as possible. The holidays would not be the holidays (arguably) without brightly wrapped packages under the tree. There must be a better solution than wrapping next year’s gifts in this year’s used wrappings. Besides, people think you are just being cheap.


When I need to pack gifts to mail I use corn starch peanuts that biodegrade in water. I made my tree as green as possible by using a live potted tree to plant outside, LED lights, biodegradable ornaments to replace last year’s broken ornaments. The discarded mound of wrapping paper was a stickler, what to do? I was about to resign myself to the inevitable “discarding the used paper to the trash ritual” when a last minute gift arrived, a personalized basket. The giver of the gift told how they selected a basket and its contents, brought it to the counter where the counter person added grass and arranged the basket.

What was that? They added grass made for the exclusive use or adding color and propping up the contents? And it hit me! I can re-use that mound of paper to line the insides of gift baskets or to cradle a gift that I am mailing. The Christmas paper is already colorful. With just a quick pass through the paper shredder, and viola, we have reused that paper by making almost instant Christmas packing paper! Doesn’t matter that the paper is torn or wrinkled, it still makes great packing material.

Let the kids tear into their gifts and rip the paper off their gifts and be happy in the knowledge that you found a use for used Christmas paper and will pack your gifts with a smaller foot print next year.