Thursday, January 06, 2011

Christmas 2011: Recycled Gift Wrap

I've been pondering waste-free Christmas gift wrappings for awhile now and wondering if I should make it a personal challenge for next year's Christmas. Especially since we've used up most of our wrapping paper.

The multiple garbage bags of wrapping paper trash on Christmas Day made me cringe a little.

But yet, I'm a bit overwhelmed with the idea of wrapping all of our gifts in reusable packaging. Maybe some, but all?  It seems a bit much for me.

While folding a brown paper bag yesterday, I came up with the non-original idea that we could save brown paper bags through the year and wrap our gifts in those instead of purchasing wrapping paper. I'll cut them apart and turn them inside out so any logos and images will be on the inside. Gift tags/package decorations will be recycled Christmas cards which I keep for projects anyways. I always have random ribbons around or I could make these bows out of old magazine pages.

My husband likes this idea and I think it'll be fun to save these items through the year and not purchase any wrapping paper!

If feeling extra ambitious, I could dress these packages up with rubber stamp designs. That would be pretty, although I'm more likely to leave them plain. We'll see!

Have you started planning for next year's Christmas yet?

No comments: