Greening the Holidays – Ideas and Resources for Families
by Paula Peterson, Children's Museum in Easton Executive Director
In this season of overdoing, overspending and overwork, is there a way to keep the spirit of the season, create holiday memories for our families, and teach our children how to take good care of our fragile planet?
We’ve put together some of our favorite ideas, along with some great websites to encourage and inspire you with their practical ideas for an environmentally friendly and stress-free holiday season.
Most ideas fall into two categories:
Ways to de-stress the holidays with simple, but meaningful family rituals
• Read a holiday story every night
• Celebrate the winter solstice (December 22) with an evening stroll to view the starry night sky (keep it brief for very young children). Then follow up with a simple candle ceremony and a special meal.
• Light a candle every night in remembrance of a cherished loved one or a favorite intention
• Help your children make a global wish list, and list all of their wishes for the flora and fauna of our planet.
Ideas to help reduce our seasonal impact on the environment
• Replace your current holiday lights with LED lights that use 90 % less energy than conventional lights and can reduce your energy costs by 50%. What a savings! Experts suggest that even if you just purchased new (conventional) lights, the cost of replacing them will be more than offset by energy savings.
• Practice SNUB – Say No to Plastic Bags – whenever possible. Carry your own cloth or fold-up tote bags with you wherever you go. Many fit easily into a purse. Consolidate your purchases into one bag. Fill up that Target or Macy’s bag, before accepting another retailer’s bag. Savings on plastic bags has a huge impact on our landfills.
• Keep excessive packagings out of your holiday gift giving. Buy gifts with no or minimal packaging, like gift cards, and tickets to events. Let retailers and manufacturers know that you refuse to purchase products with excessive packaging. Consumer pressure can have significant influence on companies.
• Use less wrapping paper by reusing last year’s gift bags or wrapping in the Sunday comics.
• Or when wrapping gifts use handmade nature-printed gift paper – give those old brown grocery bags a second use. It’s a great creative project for the kids, and a memory making opportunity.
• Send e-cards instead of holiday greeting cards! As nice as they are to receive, old greeting cards create a tremendous burden onour landfills.
Websites - a very partial, biased list of some of our favorites
• The Sierra Club – Green Holidays Guide
From America’s oldest and one of the most influential environmental groups
• Catalog Choice
This site - one of our favorites - is simple to use. If you want to get rid of all of those retail catalogs you receive in the mail, be sure to check out this site. It will be too late for this holiday season (it takes 6 - 8 weeks to see a reduction) but by the first of the year you should be receiving fewer unwanted catalogs.
• Waste Online – from the United Kingdom
This site has clear explanations and an easy to understand explanation of the impact of our holiday trash on our landfills.
• National Geographic’s The Green Guide
