Celebrate Green is full of green holiday ideas
Corey Colwell-Lipsom and her Mom, Lynn Colwell started out with an idea to Green Halloween that evolved into a website and then had people asking for advice for more holidays. It turned into the book, Celebrate Green. After reading through the Easter ideas (the book starts with spring holidays) I skimmed quickly ahead to Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. The book introduces many great ideas for greening all kinds of holidays. I was impressed by some of the more simple ideas - keep your holidays about people and not stuff - that we all know but
You can read all about Halloween at the Green Halloween web page. Follow the jump for some ideas for Thanksgiving and Christmas to get a taste of what the book is about.
Some ideas for Thanksgiving:
- Find a local farmer that you can buy a turkey from. Order way ahead of time (now perhaps) and start saving for it since it won't be 69 cents per pound like grocery store turkeys.
- Try to buy organic ingredients for your other dishes. Too expensive? Have a potluck and see if other guests might be willing to bring organic dishes.
- From other parts of the book, use real plates, silverware and glassware and cloth napkins and table cloths. All can be reused every year and become a part of your Thanksgiving tradition.
- Think about what you normally buy in decorations and extras. Reduce it by 25% and see if anyone notices.
- Reuse those decorations. Most of us have enough decorations and don't need to add to the collection each year. If you must add on, look at some different ideas. My Mom bought me one special ornament each year of my life. I still have most of them and it started me off in my adult life with enough to sparsely decorate a tree with memories. Or, as my husband and I now do, pick a special ornament from your vacation each year.
- Look for quality over quantity in your Christmas decor.
- Before purchasing new decorations, think about possible homemade or stand in options you might have. Upon receiving a three foot Christmas tree my Grandmother no longer wanted when I was a teenager I immediately placed it in my bedroom. All the ornaments I had were too large for the tiny tree. Instead of buying new ones I cut small pictures from magazines and glued them to construction paper circles to decorate my tree. It worked and I had a cute, personalized tree.
- Make gingerbread houses, string popcorn or try other DIY projects that can also become annual traditions.
- By LED light if, and only if, your old lights have worn out. Once the old lights wear out, look for options like HolidayLED.com for recycling.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-23-2008 @ 2:14PM
LisaBrenChris said...
Getting costumes at resale shops is what we did. Hey, they’ve been worn maybe once, and the ones we found were of good quality, and often in the original packaging. Since some of the accessories they come with are…cheesy, we grabbed some “real” accessories and gave them some flair. BWT, I found lots more good ideas from this article by some thrift store chain called value village. http://newsinfusion.com/video_details.php?videoId=235Anyone been to or heard of value village? There aren’t any around us.
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