Environmentally Friendly Ways To Decorate This Christmas

Christmas is an exciting time for everybody involved and decorating the home is one of the most thrilling parts, asides from opening gifts!  Hanging tinsel, putting up your tree and fixing all of your cards to the walls are all part of the process of building the excitement for the big day.  But are you considering your environmental impact over the festive period?  A vast amount is thrown away over Christmas, mostly thanks to the shrink wrapped packaging that a lot of modern goods comes in.
Whilst we can’t do much about how large corporations choose to cut their profits, we can keep an eye on making our holidays as eco as possible.

The lighting in our homes accounts for a lot of electricity wasted throughout the year and by throwing up a thousand fairy lights at Christmas, we stand to make this problem worse.  But you can’t have Christmas without fairy lights, so what do we do?  Well by turning off your fairy lights at night when you go to sleep you stand to save yourself up to 35% of the cost.  Fairy lights are now also coming in friendlier energy saving varieties and if you’re going to hang them in your garden, a perfect way to do your bit to save the planet is by buying solar powered lights.  These will charge during the sunlight hours and then automatically activate when evening rolls around, they run on the power stored during the day and have no impact on the environment.

Think back to last Christmas and the bin liners full of wrapping paper that get thrown outside after the manic morning.  Did you recycle this wrapping paper last year?  Most wrapping paper can be recycled and depending upon your local council’s schedule and procedure, it can be as simple as just throwing it into the recycling bin rather than the disposal bin.  We can’t control how our loved ones choose to wrap gifts for us, but we can make sure that we’re wrapping their gifts in recyclable paper.  Check the packaging before you buy for the recycling icon.

Going natural is the perfect way to embrace the true sense of Christmas whilst improving the green credentials of your holiday period.  Think about all the things that you use in their plastic recreations.  Are you using a real Christmas tree?  Are your halls decked with real holly or is it fake?  When you steal a kiss under the mistletoe, do you get the scent of pine and timber or is it a mock-up?  Opting to use natural materials not only helps you do your bit for the environment but it takes you back to tradition, where all these quirky customs first started.

If you can’t deal with having a real Christmas tree shredding its needles over your carpet for the whole of December, you could consider buying a fibre optic artificial tree.  They consume far less power than trees which are hung with fairy lights, though the latter can always be turned off if you’re feeling a little guilty about your energy levels!