As captain of our Christmas season, I take on a litany of tasks to recreate for my family the holidays I enjoyed as a child: mailing cards, decorating our home, baking gingerbread cookies, shopping and more shopping, then wrapping and more wrapping. This would be fine and good if there were only twelve days of Christmas, but somehow the whole shebang warped into several weeks of prep work.
As I fished for ideas to make the holiday less stressful, I stumbled onto some Austin-original traditions that give more of ourselves to our families by taking less from the environment.
A low-stress holiday that’s also eco-friendly?
Yes….read on!
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GO LOCAL!
Bernadette Noll and Paula McDermott are two south Austin moms who regard the winter school break as the ideal time for a “staycation”: remaining home and enjoying outings around town, the most earth-friendly vacation there is.
With our mild winter weather, Austin is a great place to be outdoors with children. Touring their own empty streets on their bikes, these families like to explore creeks and parks “while the masses are gone or gone shopping.”
“On Christmas Day, our tradition is a bike ride around town culminating in a cookout at a park somewhere,” says Bernadette. “It's such a great day to be out on the streets on bikes.”
During the winter holidays, Lanell Coultas and her three-year-old son, Hugh, like to search for pine trees so that they can prepare seed-crusted pine cones for the birds that visit their Windsor Park yard. Their hunt is made easier this year with a new website: treeroundup.com. A project of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and TreeFolks, the website identifies and allows anyone to map the exact location of certain trees. By the way, the loblolly pine that is closest to Hugh is in front of Andrews Elementary School.
Carol LeClair’s family packs up every year for a post-Christmas campout in the hill country. “We camp at Garner State Park to enjoy time with each other and to avoid the post-Christmas consumerism with the sales and the gift returns,” Carol says. “We have never had bad weather, and we’ve gone swimming on New Year’s Day every year.”
Taking pressure off of families and the environment during the holiday season can mean shifting the time spent on card mailings, travel, gift-making or shopping to other months of the year. Months in advance, Carol gets a jumpstart on preparing her homemade gifts of pickled cucumbers, which she picks fresh off the vine between May and July. Paula has considered saving the return address labels from holiday cards so that she “can write back to each sender at another time during the year [for] a surprise non-holiday greeting.”
Andrea Basinski opts for buying a prepared holiday meal instead of spending hours grocery shopping and cooking. “I have regularly spent more [time and money] to have something not as good and have ended up with more waste,” she says.
WASTE NOT WANT NOT
Andrea brings up a good point: The average household in our country wastes at least a quarter of the food we buy, contributing to our mounting landfills. Landfills are the largest source of human-related methane gas, an emission that is 20 times more harmful to our atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
For me, eliminating the stream of holiday catalogues pouring through my mail-slot has freed-up my family to focus less on mindless shopping and more on the people in our home. Opting out of bulk mail three years ago has been a gift that keeps on giving to our planet. According to the Center for a New American Dream, “the production and disposal of direct mail consumes more energy than 3 million cars in order to create 5.8 million tons of catalogs and other direct mailings that end up as 450,000 garbage trucks worth of waste each year.” If everybody canceled just 10 mail order catalogues, the stack of canceled catalogues would be 2,000 miles high, according to Use-Less-Stuff.org.
With all of the mail, packaging and food waste that comes with our merrymaking, it may come as no surprise that Americans throw away 25% more trash during the Thanksgiving to New Year's holiday period than any other time of year. The extra waste amounts to 25 million tons of garbage, or about one million extra tons per week. But with some simple modifications, we can change that.
THE GIFT DILEMMA
“I can’t tell you how many times we’ve received some gigantic toy from relatives without any regard for how we would get it home on the plane or where we’d keep it in our small house,” one mom told me (she prefers to remain anonymous — for obvious reasons).
Whether you have relatives who go overboard when it comes to gifting or you just want to do better by Mother Earth, it might be time for some new gift-giving practices.
Wish lists are one way to ensure that a gift won’t show up in a White Elephant gift exchange or worse, in a landfill. Several years ago, members of my family started online “alternative gift” registries that could include anything: yoga passes, a hike up Enchanted Rock, or spending money for an upcoming vacation. Anyone can create an online wish list at alternativegiftregistry.org
This year, Amy Cox’s family is asking relatives to contribute to their trip to Mexico in lieu of presents under a tree. While 10-year-old Olivia wants the Mexico trip more than anything, “Eli [age 6] has a longer list,” Amy says, “but he’s excited to speak Spanish and go to the mummy museum in Guanajuato.”
Gift cards to a favorite store are an increasingly popular gift, but also contribute to more than 75 million pounds of PVC material from plastic cards that are sent to landfills each year. Now a company called Earthworks in Ohio accepts shipments of these plastic cards for recycling. This year, I am including a stamped envelope addressed to Earthworks along with the gift cards I give to my children’s music teachers. Not only am I keeping a couple of cards out of the landfill, but I’m also letting them know about this great service.
“Whenever possible, I buy services instead of things,” Andrea says. “OK, in moderation. I realize that my two-, six- and seven-year-old kids will be seriously bummed if there are no Legos under the tree. But nobody ever rejects a massage, a trip to Chuck E. Cheese, or a campout with s’mores.”
Mary Louise Shack’s family has a long tradition of exchanging gifts with only the family members in their household and giving each other only one present. “We start with the youngest person who gives all their gifts and we move up the age ladder from there,” she says.
Like the Shack family, some families limit the gifts or kinds of gifts that are exchanged among the adults. Drawing names so that each adult buys for only one other adult, or making charitable donations in someone’s name are increasingly common practices. Years ago, Jill Bedgood and Jesse Gregg started donating money in honor of their adult family members to Heifer International, which provides farm animals for families in developing countries. “This concept caught on, and now everyone in Jesse’s family donates to a charitable organization of their choice and notifies us. … It is the spirit of life and helping others,” Jill says.
Last year, Shari Holland shared that spirit with her three nephews, ages five to 12, whom she asked to decide together which charity will receive the 50-dollar bill she sent them. “They unanimously agreed to give the money through their church to a program sponsoring nursing education for women in Africa,” she says. “The boys were very excited to be able to make a contribution to a project that was important to their family. Their youngest sibling was adopted from the Congo and they are well aware of the need for the nursing program.”
DECK THE HALLS, TRIM THE TRASH
Reducing gift wrap and package waste is an obvious and creative way to be kinder to our environment. Packaging materials make up more than 30% of all consumer waste in the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The Levit family celebrates Hanukkah with gifts wrapped in colorful re-usable fabric bags that Katy Levit made years ago. “A couple have been purchased, but I also use pillow cases, scarves, and have made my own bags with fabric and a glue gun,” she says.
Other ideas for reducing waste include:
—Shopping local to avoid shipping waste
—Wrapping multiple gifts to the same person in one box or bag
—Re-using gift bags
—Wrapping gifts in thrift-store scarves, magazines, the comic papers, kids’ artwork, discarded architectural drawings from architects’ offices, or leftover banner material from a sign shop. Instead of traditional bows, use fabric or wire-rimmed ribbon, scarf tied in a billowy bow or even a small toy.
However you give back to the Earth this year, have a happy holiday and remember: please re-use or recycle your copy of Parent:Wise magazine!
RECOMMENDED READING
“Create YOUR Slow Holiday” at www.slowfamilyliving.com
“Simplify the Holidays” at www.newdream.org
Hundred Dollar Holiday by Bill McKibben
Unplug the Christmas Machine: A complete Guide to Putting the Love and Joy Back into the Season by Jo Robinson & Jean Coppock Staeheli
Also….
If you want to give the gift of books, stop by Recycled Reads (5335 Burnet Rd.). This Austin Public Library bookstore sells books at rock-bottom prices: $2 for hardbacks, $1 for paperbacks and 50¢ for children’s books. All proceeds benefit the Austin Public Library — and all unsold books go to philanthropic companies that raise money to fund schools and libraries in developing countries or are sent to recyclers that ensure the materials are handled and reused in environmentally responsible ways (such as insulation for building materials).
Amy Chamberlain is a mother of two daughters and a PTA “Go Green” Committee Leader at Bryker Woods Elementary School. She and her family live in Austin.
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