Guest Author

The festive season is definitely a time to be jolly. It’s a time of celebration, family, festivity, giving and sharing. With this in mind it is a great idea to get the whole family involved and ensure you have a green Christmas.

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Although the holidays bring out the best in most of us each year, they also bring with it ton’s of extra rubbish, millions of chopped-down trees and megawatts of flashing lights. You can do your part this festive season by making small changes, advises Rory Murray, Marketing Director of Tuffy Brands.

“Allow the focus of this festive season to be about sharing time with family and friends and not about being disappointed because you can’t find the perfect gifts within budget,” he says.

Murray suggests visiting your local nursery and hunt for a real Christmas tree. The great thing about this is that you can plant the tree afterwards helping you off-set some of your festive carbon footprint as well as adding to a special memory of your Christmas.

He offers some tips as to how you can add to your green Christmas by making your own decorations, gifts and taking care of all the trash that comes with this time of year.

Decorating:
To decorate your ‘green’ tree, why not get the whole family involved in the fun of creating beautiful tasty biscuit decorations to hang from your tree.

Ingredients:   
•       350g flour
•       5ml bicarbonate soda
•       30ml ground ginger
•       15ml ground cinnamon
•       2.5ml ground cloves
•       1ml nutmeg
•       175mg brown sugar
•       60ml honey
•       1 egg     

Instructions   
•       Mix butter with mixture of the spices, bicarb soda and flour until it is breadcrumb like and then mix in sugar
•       Beat an egg into slightly warmed honey and pour into the mixture, mixing until it becomes a soft dough, layer on a floured surface and cut out biscuit shapes.
•       Pierce a hold in each one to put string through to hang on tree
•       Place baking sheets on two baking trays and place the cut shapes onto trays and bake at 180°C until golden brown (±10 minutes) Allow to cool and harden for 10 minutes   

Decorating (Icing)   
•       1 egg white
•       Icing sugar
•       Natural colouring
•       Add icing sugar to a beaten egg until stiff enough for piping
•       Add colouring to brighten them up
•       Add other sweets and dried fruit to decorate
•       Allow to dry, place string through holes and hang on tree  

Used CD’s and DVD’s are great for window decorations; apply some paint, beads and ribbon and turn them into ornaments.

Use natural elements like pinecones, which you can decorate; add glue, ribbon and other crafty elements to create angels or some earthly garland. Be sure to compost your leftovers at the end of the holiday.

String sweets, popcorn and liquorice all-sorts onto cotton and hang on windows and trees.

Turn last years’ holiday cards into recycled cards for this year or redecorate, add crafty elements and hang as decorations.

Convert plastic containers and glass into snowmen and angels.

Recycle holiday gift-wrap & decorations:

Save on buying gift-wrap by re-using gift-wrap you have saved from previous occasions or think out of the box and get creative by using materials such as old pillowcases or t-shirts, which you can paint.

According to the Recyclers Handbook, half of the paper consumed each year is used to wrap and decorate consumer products. The annual trash from gift-wrap and shopping bags totals over 4 million tons. If everyone wrapped just three gifts in reused paper or fabric gift bags, it would save enough paper to cover 45,000 soccer stadiums.

Store-bought Christmas cards are rich, elegant and expensive. They also consume a huge amount of natural resources for a throw-away item. It is estimated that in the US alone the amount of cards sold during the holiday season would fill a football field 10 stories high, and requires the harvesting of nearly 300,000 trees. Homemade cards may not be as professional, but they are more personal and just as appreciated. Making the cards is also a fun activity for the family.

Sustainable Giving:
Air spritz and foot sprays are fun and personal gifts. Scout your local charity or 2nd hand shops of interesting bottles or recycle other bottles. To make: Put 5 drops of your favourite essential oil into a 100ml bottle of distilled water. Shake and then enjoy the aroma.

A good choice is sweet orange or vanilla essence, which will not only scent a room but assist with refreshing your mood. Ylang Ylang or Lavender is also a good choice as this floral aroma sooths and calms. You can also make your own foot spray by adding a few drops of peppermint into a bottle of distilled water.

Dried fruit snacks are healthy and great looking gifts. Creativity is endless for the way you choose to present this. To make: pour various dried fruit and nuts into a bowl and mix. Then pour into nice looking jars or old interesting containers. An alternative is to use different kinds of colourful sweets.

Grow your own flowers or plants to give as gifts, you can decorate the pots and personalise them for those special people.

Enjoy the countdown:
Make your very own advent calendar and turn your junk into treasure for the countdown to the festive season.

Take a scrap piece of wood; paint it with a coat of white paint. Age it slightly by using some sandpaper to give it that shabby-chic look. Mark off a grid of 4 rows of 6 dots, and evenly space them; mark the dots with a pencil. Then hammer a nail onto each dot, leaving enough sticking out to hang things on.

Gather different numbers from 1 to 24 and do the same with miscellaneous items you find lying around the house (buttons, stars, keys, game pieces), tie a string to each item. Place on the board and each day you remove one item of the represented day.

Recycle:
You will be left with huge amounts of rubbish to dispose of, both on Christmas day and even more so on New Years day. Be sure to recycle your rubbish. If you haven’t got a home recycling centre now is a great time to sort one out. Get yourself four different bins; glass, plastic, paper and metal and sort your trash.

While you are at it make a small change and use refuse bags that are made from 100% recycled materials especially those with more than 70% from post-consumer waste. (Try Tuffy’s heavy duty refuse bags).

The real cost of Christmas:
According to the Australian Conservation Foundation and their report, ‘The hidden cost of Christmas,’ they calculated the environmental impacts of producing Christmas. Although these are Australian based figures, it gives you an indication of the real impact the festive season has on the environment.

During Christmas clothing and related items produce approximately 720,000 tons of greenhouse pollution, 38 gigalitres of water and more than half a million hectares of disturbed land over the festive period. To put it in perspective you would need to leave your garden hose running for 324 years to use that much water.

Books and magazines consume over 400,000 tons of materials such as waste paper, ink cartridges and packaging, it leaves more than 40,000 hectares of land disturbed and created the equivalent of a years pollution from 85,000 cars.

Alcohol over the festive season is plenty and in fact it took over 42 gigalitres of water, enough to fill 42,000 Olympic sized swimming pools to produce all the beer and wine required in 2004.

Household appliances like DVD players generate 780,000 tons of greenhouse pollution before they are even switched on.

So before you rush out to decorate, purchase and consume follow these tips to help you and the environment through an eco-friendly festive season. Happy holidays.

For more information visit: www.tuffy.co.za <http://www.tuffy.co.za>;  or facebook.com/tuffybrands or @tuffybrands on Twitter

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