Go Green for the Holidays - How to have a more eco-friendly Christmas

Make your holiday season even more joyous going green this Christmas! There are dozens of easy eco-friendly solutions you can implement. Just trading a couple of your usual holiday practices for more eco-friendly alternatives can make a huge difference. Tis the season to start living greener.

Eco-friendly Gift Giving

• Adopt an endangered animal or buy a subscription to an organization working to make the world a better place.
• For gifts that require batteries, buy rechargeable batteries and make sure the recipient has a battery charger.
• Secret Santa
  • Not only is Secret Santa an eco-friendly activity, it's also a perfect money-saving solution for those who have been affected by the economic recession.
• Alternate types of gift wrap
  • Newspaper - using the comics section is especially cute and kitschy.
  • Kids drawings - a great family activity that you can also use for Christmas cards.
  • Leftover pieces of fabric or wallpaper. 
  • Put the gift inside another gift like a nice wooden box or a decorative tin.
  • Invest in gift bags that you can use year after year. Keep them organized with this Gift Bag Organizer.
• Recycle Gift Wrap 
  • If you do use gift wrap, make sure you recycle it after the holidays. According to National Geographic, if every family reused just 2 feet [0.6 meter] of holiday ribbon, the 38,000 miles [61,000 kilometers] of ribbon saved could tie a bow around the entire planet.
  • You can also save boxes and Styrofoam to use for moving and storage.

Eco-Friendly Christmas Trees

• Artificial Christmas Tree
  • An increasingly popular option is getting an artificial Christmas tree to reuse each year. But keep in mind that artificial trees use significant amounts of energy and petroleum-based materials during their manufacture. However, a one-time purchase of an artificial tree can save gas otherwise used for annual trips to the Christmas tree farm.
  • The most eco-friendly Christmas tree you can get is something like the Holiday! Holiday! 7ft Spiral Tree with 300 Lights, Clear. This is also probably the most wallet-friendly solution.
• Christmas Tree Farms
  • A great family activity is to go to a Christmas tree farm and cut down your own tree. An easier option is to get your tree from a seasonal Christmas tree lot. Most of these lots also get their trees from Christmas tree farms. So forests aren't hurt by choosing a cut tree, said Jeff Olson, the vice-president of marketing and development for American Forests, a Washington, D.C.-based conservation nonprofit.
• Recycle Christmas trees
  • The most important thing to remember if you buy a live Christmas tree is to recycle it once you're done with it. Throwing your Christmas tree away with your normal garbage is not good for the environment. "Christmas trees are the leading cause of landfill overfilling. We only ues reusable resources here in Alaska," says OldFartSears, a member on MySears.
    
    The National Christmas Tree Association, an organization which represents Christmas tree growers, has teamed up with Scottsdale, Arizona-based conservation group Earth 911 to point consumers in the right direction with their trees. On their Web site, you can enter your zip code to find the nearest of 3,800-plus spots nationwide that accept old trees.

Eco-friendly Christmas Decorations

• Use Low Energy Lights (LED)
  • Using LED lights for your Christmas decorations could save you up to 80% in energy. GE Energy Smart LED 100 Lights, Warm White is a great choice.
  • According to one U.S. Department of Energy study, if everyone replaced their conventional holiday light strings with LEDs, at least two billion kilowatt-hours of electricity could be saved in a month. The savings would be enough to power 200,000 homes for a year, according to Littleton, Colorado-based Holiday Creations, which makes and distributes a popular line of LED light strings.
  • LED bulbs are rated to last 25,000 hours and you can connect up to 25 light sets together.
• Evergreen decorations and garlands
  • Do some pruning right before Christmas and use the best clippings for inside. 
  • Clip some evergreen branches and make your very own Christmas wreath.
  • Decorate your wreaths and garlands with pinecones, Granny Smith apples, eucalyptus, juniper.
  • "I always remember my Granddad going out and cutting bittersweet vines and decorating with them," workaholic says.
• Make eco-friendly wreaths out of unusual objects
  • Create a Christmas ball wreath by gluing different colored Christmas tree balls on a straw wreath.
  • Recycle old Christmas cards and cut them out into leaf shapes. Make a wreath out of the "leaves."
  • Tie star cookie cutters together into a wreath shape.
  • "I like the various Craftsman tool ornaments," AdamO says. "You got the colorful resin ornaments. And, then there are the awesome metal ornaments."

Want more ideas? These books have even more great ideas and tips on how to have an eco-friendly holiday.

• Green Christmas: How to Have a Joyous, Eco-Friendly Holiday Season
• Decorating with Papercraft
• Santa Claus is Green!

Have your own eco-friendly holiday traditions? We want to hear about them! Tell us how your family is going green for the holidays.