Environmentally-friendly Holiday Decorations
For those of you who might have missed my post last week, I am attempting to plan an eco-friendly holiday season this year.
Each year I seem to find some new holiday-themed knick-knacks or decorations that I absolutely cannot live without. I buy them with wanton disregard for how they are made, what they are made of and where they come from.
As a general rule, these sparkly little chotchkies are plastic-based crap made in polluting factories then cargo-shipped from China to be sold at Wal-Mart. They may be fake (sorry, "faux") pine boughs glued to a styrofoam wreath, big plastic letters wrapped in velvet that spell out nonsensical words when rearranged by hubby, or a giant inflatable Santa in a globe with swirling polyethelyne snow beads.
I love them all.
But, I will no longer be purchasing any of this lame-ass crap. None of it. No matter how sparkly it is. And to ensure that I don't, I have developed the following plan:
- I will make do with the decorations I already have.
- I will create my own lame-ass decorations with my children.
- And, if a moment of weakness does arrive, I will purchase hand-crafted decorations made from sustainable materials and produced by local artisans.
Of course, that artisan stuff is usually pretty pricey, so I'll probably just stick with the first two options. I may no longer be tacky, but I'm still cheap.
Savings:
Based on previous years' experience, I would guesstimate that I will be saving approximately 8-10 pounds of pure crap and all the CO2 pollution that comes with it.
Difficulty Level: 2 out of 5
The trick with this is to STAY THE HELL OUT OF WAL-MART AND TARGET! If I don't see it, I won't want it. God help me if I end up needed underwear, method handsoap or giant bags of candy though.
2 comments:
I don't know if you remember, but when you were little, our decorations consisted of strung popcorn, the big paper chains you and your sisters made, and one year, strung cranberries. Don't reccommend the cranberries. They rotted, fell of the string and left big red blobs on the floor that were difficult to remove. The popcorn and chains were great, though! Ah, your blog takes me back many a decade!
love,
Uma
Popcorn decorations would be a pretty great solution for me, because even if the dogs got to them somehow, we wouldn't end up with sparkly dog poo for a week :)
I agree - staying out of Target is job #1! And I will be making do with all of the fake plastic crap that I bought with zest last year... hopefully what I have will be enough to satisfy my need for sparkles for a while to come.
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