A green Christmas

"The most wonderful time of the year" has passed & the new year is upon us. We partied three days straight, visiting friends the 24th, my parents & sister's family the 25th, then both my sisters, associated children & husbands, a few in-laws, an aunt & uncle, cousins, my parents & Sprouty's great-grandparents for Boxing Day. It was a pretty good Christmas, I have to say.

Here's my Christmas scorecard on how eco-friendly we managed to keep it. I've used green text for the more environmentally conscious aspects & red text for things we will try to do better next year.

• We got Sprout's first photo with Santa taken, only one print, sharing it digitally.
• We made a gingerbread house out of a kit, so lots of packaging was involved. 
• We decorated our massive Ikea fir tree with hand-me-down ornaments mostly & LED lights. Rather than The star on the top is old bulbs, though. I also broke down & bought a package of 25 plastic baubles because I thought it looked a little bare. I still haven't decided whether it's greener to use a real cut tree or a fake one.
• I wrapped my nieces' & nephew's gifts in paper, but I used up old paper I've had around for years & some vintage paper that we found in Oli's parents' basement.
• I made three fabric gift bags (out of scraps I had already) for Sprout's presents, one of which is a battery-free wind-up boom box. I plan to make more gift bags each year so we have enough different sizes for anything we give him. This year I made a couple larger ones & stuffed all his presents into them.
• We didn't buy gifts for anyone but Sprout's little friends & cousins, instead donating the money we would have spent on potentially over-packaged, unneeded gifts to the SPCA Biscuit Fund.
• We used Co-op cars to get to two events that are difficult by transit & walked or took the bus to the rest. With Co-op cars we 'stack' visits & errands, doing multiple things that are in the same area on one trip to make our car usage more efficient.
• We decided to be lazy, not doing laundry & using disposable diapers when we were out over Christmas. Next year I'll try to do a big load of laundry right before all the festivities start so we have lots of clean cloth diapers to go out with. It's mostly a question of planning: washing a load of diapers requires being home & running downstairs to the laundry every hour for about four hours.
• I sent out about 40 paper Christmas cards; I'm still working through my stash of bought-on-sale-after-Xmas cards. I love the tradition of sending cards, but next year I'll try to use recycled paper & decorate them myself.