Ten Tips for a Sustainable, Green Christmas

Ten Sustainable Days of Christmas. Play sustainability Bingo!

So far I tick ten, more or less.

https://tallblondetales.com

These tips from ewspconsultancy.com

Ten Tips for a Sustainable and Green Christmas

• Buy your Christmas food locally where possible, or purchase craft from a local market. Support local, small or family-owned businesses where you can. Support local bakeries for your fresh bread as this supports employment and tastes so much better than supermarket frozen offerings.
• Make a homemade gift instead of buying one.
• Give a relative an experience or a helping hand, such as mowing their lawn, as a gift). Give someone a voucher for an ‘experience’.
• Thinking of getting a pet: adopt an animal from the shelter.
• Give edible gifts – home made jams, chutneys and other preserves, infused spirits, cakes, biscuits/cookies or sweets/chocolates, even dried herb or tea blends.
• Use solar-powered Christmas lights/decorations
• Choose an environmentally friendly gift – e.g. a funky, natural, art project using natural or reclaimed materials and placed in an upcycled frame.
• Give Plants or Seeds from your garden as gifts – see below
• Make natural gifts – including lip balms, bath bombs, and scrubs using herbs and flowers
• Beeswax can be turned into a wrap or used to make candles
• Wrap gifts in an eco-green bag, old fabric or clothing cut up, newspaper or normal paper, old greeting cards, magazines or newspapers, or even fabric like a scarf from an old op shop.
• Use reclaimed fabrics to make small gifts such as makeup bags or zippered pouches for people

Photo by Kha Ruxury on Pexels.com

Other Sustainable Gift Ideas

Instead of exchanging gifts, exchange less used/unused clothes with friends.

Pick a few close friends and have an exchange of such pieces.

It doesn’t sound super-exciting, but it is a great way to be sustainable and save money. We all have pieces in our wardrobe that we seldom use.

You can make it more fun by having a secret Santa system and guessing later who got whom. 

Christmas Gift Alternative – Plantable Christmas Cards

Christmas cards have short lives and are wasteful of resources unless you make them yourself from your craft stash.

I love this idea of plantable Christmas cards: When the card is finished, plant it along with the seeds in the garden soil. The seeds grow, and the paper decomposes.

You can even D.I.Y and make these at home from the craft stash.

Sending Christmas E Cards

E-cards still consume power. Look for ones that will donate to charity with every E-card you send as a way of helping those less fortunate.

How Christmas Shopping is Changing

While Scandinavia observes the time-honoured rituals and traditions of Advent and selecting a live fir tree, Australian shoppers prepare for their Christmas experience by visiting Westfield shopping centres and erecting plastic Christmas trees.

Perhaps you call them malls or something else, but these concrete Westfield centres pay homage to Western greed and indulgence. They are places where every possible gift or want could be exchanged for money. But visiting these venues at Christmas is not just about purchasing gifts, it is also an endurance experience.

It is cut-throat and dog-eat-dog – believe me.

For instance, it is not uncommon to experience a minor verbal brawl over the last free car parking space at Westfield at Christmastime.

Once the Christmas shopping is complete, arms laden with bags brimming with gifts, Aussie consumers dodge and weave the line-up of vehicles circumnavigating the Westfield car parks, like participants in the old video game: ‘frogger.’

Woe betide any shopper arriving late to the shopping party (i.e. after 10 in the morning) as this automatically marshals you into a ‘hunt.’ To snag a spare car park after 10 am at Westfield is like winning the lottery. Any human carrying shopping bags in the car park precinct is stalked and followed in the desperate hope the ‘prey’ will vacate their car park and not just offload their gift cache and return to the shops for a second ‘run’ through the Christmas crowds.

Every man must fend for himself in this retail frenzy.

Thinking Outside the Box

I know of one homeowner who capitalised on Xmas, finding a silver lining in the chaos. Compensating for the proximity of his home to a Westfield shopping centre, he made a small fortune in tax-free cash, renting out his yard as an impromptu car park to desperate shoppers in the days leading up to and after Xmas.

Good on him. There has to be some compensation for tolerating the bastion of consumerism at your back door.

However, Westfield’s days seem to be limited – the pandemic has changed the consumer landscape forever.

Shopping online, or choosing to ‘click and collect’, saves most consumers time and stress. Modern youth embraces it – despite issues with delivery (tell me about it) and the fact that buying online produces more fossil fuels in transport and the manufacture of the necessary plastic packaging. This includes black plastic packaging, which can’t be recycled at all due to carbon black pigments.

So, I ask: what is the future for the behemoths of consumerism and the acres of asphalt that constitute the car parks?

Will the ‘Christmas Shopping phenomenon, the ruthless haggling over car park spots, and the bustling Westfield Xmas chaos relegate the concrete monoliths to a slow decay, unwanted and unable to adapt?

Is there still a place for the in-store shopping experience?

What do you think?

A Gift for All Ages – Puzzle Review

Ever tried to find a perfect Christmas or Birthday gift to span across various age groups. A gift to give a family of young and old? An educational and learning gift that challenges the mind and engages the receiver for more than 10 minutes?

Books are great but not everyone likes reading, or the same genre. Then there is edible gifts but choosing an appropriate food means you now have to factor in gluten free, dairy free, lactose free and vegan options. Too many families have food intolerances that must be considered. It is too hard.

Enter the 1000 piece Jigsaw Puzzle from Shannxi Toy Manufacturer.

Puzzles are excellent toys for fostering the development of logical thinking and intelligence. Puzzles are not only educational, but essential in children’s intellectual development as they promote spatial awareness and understanding of shape relationships. These three dimensional skills are especially important in creative pursuits, design or engineering careers.

Shannxi 1000 Piece Balloon Puzzle

I was kindly gifted a wonderful Jigsaw puzzle from Toy Manufacturer Shannxi Classical Trade Co. Their jigsaw puzzles are made of thickened paper, are strong and durable, and suitable for ages 7 – 107 years of age.

The puzzle in a box complete with separators for sorting the various styles of puzzle pieces. It defintiely helps to sort the light blue from the dark blue when it comes to placing sky tones.

As it happens, my neighbour is somewhat of an expert in jigsaw puzzles. At 91 years young, she is fit and sharp minded, something she attributes to her love of completing jigsaw puzzles.

Peg is the authority so here is what she thought of the puzzle:

Review of Shaanxi Hot Air Balloon Puzzle

Likes

• Border is easy to figure out and complete
• Two puzzles in one – the reverse side is printed as another puzzle
• Template Mat included, is a great reference tool and can be used as a sorting mat
• The puzzle is a lot of fun
• Reverse side gives a clue for difficult areas of similar color
• Puzzle box has separators to categorize and sort pieces – very useful and a great idea
• Design will please most adults
• Fosters patience and hand dexterity and great for those prone to arthritis in the hands
• Puzzle can be completed by doing one section at a times due to dual printing on both sides
• Constructed using high quality wood and paper pieces

Peg’s Dislikes

• The blue sky was tricky and required perseverance to complete
• The pieces were hard to retrieve once inserted in the puzzle. ie. if they are inserted in the wrong place and are changed. A small piece broke off from the printed underside of the puzzle piece when it was switched around.
• The design could have benefited from some smaller balloons in the distance for higher visual interest.

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My Recommendations

1. I am very happy to recommend this product for children and adults.
2. The puzzle is challenging enough to engage and adult and child for many hours.
3. It has the therapeutic advantage of being great practice for fine motor dexterity and hand control.
4. It is educational in the sense that it uses the mind to compute shapes and spatial relationships.
5. Delivery was timely and email communication with the company was without problem.

Shaanxi also have fully customized options and 3 D puzzles for your enjoyment.

If you are interested in purchasing a Jigsaw puzzle for Christmas or that special gift, Jason and the team will be happy to assist you with various delivery options to meet your personal needs.

Shaanxi Classical Grain Trade Co. +86 15829369901

We chat: +86 15829369901

Email: 982067068@qq.com

*I received no monetary incentive for this review.

Here are some more Christmas gift ideas.

Buy one thing

Come on Aussie, come on.

Support our smaller shops doing it tough.

Buy just one thing from our smaller gift shops to keep them going through this crisis, or when it is over, we won’t have those beautiful shops to browse through.

Your purchase doesn’t have to cost much.

Australians are renowned for their community spirit and helping one another. If we all join in, we can help each other get through this crisis.

The following link takes you to a small kitchenware shop in Buderim Queensland who has the most wonderful gifts.

Kitchen Mojo Shop at Buderim on Instagram

Unique Kitchen products include a trolley cover for shopping trolleys. They are made locally and make a wonderful gift for an elderly neighbour or relative.

They prevent germs from touching the handles of the trolley while doing your shopping.

When will you order yours?