La Condesa Lucanor

There are beautiful things about the holidays, like the generally festive spirit that starts to creep in come November and the unexplainable urge to get together with loved ones and have home-cooked meals with some candles flickering around the room… unfortunately the nostalgia is often overshadowed by the stress of buying presents, crowded shopping areas, traffic…  and what I’ve been worried about this holiday season: how environmentally un-friendly the whole thing is!

What if we had a greener holiday season?  This has been on my mind these last couple of days, and I’ve been thinking about how to balance out the carbon footprint of all the flying around I’m going to do in the next couple of months and I’ve come up with certain guidelines I’m already holding myself up to for this holiday season – here they go:

1. I will not buy crap. This is hard people, especially in China – land of all the Christmas junk you can possibly imagine – they don’t celebrate the holiday here - yet some part of the massive amount of Santa trinkets that are cluttering the world this month has been kept in their country of origin and they are CHEAP and have twinkly lights!
But I refuse to buy the stuff.  My grandma taught me long ago that “cheap things are expensive” – and though I assume she mean the advice to be more stylistic than environmentally friendly, it is very “green”.  Instead of buying all these cheap decorations that will only last through the month, why don’t we decorate with nuts, fallen branches, and if we really must buy something – let’s get a good quality object, something that is beautiful and timeless and that we’ll want to use for many years.

2. I will be socially responsible when buying presents. I’m getting things (good things, see number 1) that are made by local craftsman and designers and avoiding the big brand name shops. Gifting “experiences” rather than objects is also a good one - people love concert tickets, spa treatments, cooking classes… This makes sense not only because you’re supporting your local merchants and artists but also because the carbon footprint of these gifts is significantly lower.

3. I will keep the packaging minimal and green. Wrapping paper is beautiful and I adore it but it’s also tremendously wasteful. So I’ll try to reuse packaging as much as possible, I mean how many bags do we have lying around the house? Just take one, cut it up, turn it around, draw something festive on top and there’s your wrapping paper! If you MUST – get recycled one please.

That’s it - just three points, but if we stick to them we can help lower the massive amounts of completely unnecessary waste that will be produced around the world around the holiday months! Now THAT’S a reason to be all giddy and festive…