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Tips For Green Holidays
The holidays and other events such as birthdays, weddings and showers can be extremely stressful on the environment! Decorations, wrapping paper, greeting cards, dinner parties, and food waste add to the landfill, use extreme amounts of energy, and deplete forests. We shouldn't forget about the environment when celebrating special occasions. Here are some tips we can all use to “green” our holidays.
DECORATIONS
Reduce the amount of plastic decorations. Use your imagination and use more natural items you can find around your house. For example, rather than buying plastic spiders and other critters for Halloween decorations, make your own by collecting some rocks, painting them with water based paints, and decorate them with pipe cleaners for legs, raisins, or nuts for facial features. It's a great activity for kids.
Tree decorating: string dried cranberries or popcorn for garland; use pomegranates, pine cones, cinnamon sticks bundled with raffia for ornaments. The decorations along with the tree can all be composted when the season is over.
Reuse greeting cards to make paper snowflakes or ornamental balls as decorations.
Hollow out small fruit or vegetables such as apples, oranges, pumpkins, artichokes and use them as candle- holders—remember to compost when finished using them.
Use extra pieces of your tree as garland for staircases, windowsills or mantles.
Real trees can be beneficial as opposed to artificial trees that are made of plastics and have been treated with chemicals. Tree farms help to clean and add oxygen to the air. For every tree taken, a few seedlings are planted and grow quite quickly. Many of these trees are able to grow in areas with poor soil conditions, thus many tree farms are planted in these areas, and help to improve the soil conditions.