it’s beginning to look a lot like…

Holiday shopping time again! Of course in the stores it started looking like that a few weeks ago. Anyway, I just wanted to throw out some ideas for having a “greener” holiday season with your gift giving this year. There are the obvious ones like making gifts instead of buying them, or offering up a service for someone to help make their life a little easier. Here are some others:

Give someone the gift of no more junk mail and the planting of ten trees from Greendimes…you can do a whole gift pack along with it with a reusable bag, a t-shirt, and some CFLs.

For a book lover…give them a membership to BookSwim…an online library with no late fees

I am personally a huge fan of Blockbuster’s online rental service because I can go in and exchange them in the store too…it makes an awesome gift.

The nice thing about gift cards is that the receiver can decide what they want…especially from a place like Target where we can all pretty much find something…I just think it is cool that their gift cards are now biodegradable.

I personally think a great gift would be a daily calendar with a simple green thing you can do for each day…like the Living Green Page-A-Day Calendar or the Do Just One Thing Calendar (this is the one I really want…hint hint ). Just make sure the receiver recycles those pages somehow!

There are obviously hundreds of great green gift ideas….check out Treehugger’s gift guides from 2005 and 2006…the 2007 one is coming soon.

But I also want to mention gift wrapping. I have always been against gift wrapping because I have always thought it was such a waste of paper (see I have been a treehugger from day one). It may also be because I am really lazy and am horrible at wrapping gifts, but whatever. So I am a huge fan of gift bags and other creative gift wrapping ideas

This year I think an excellent way to present a gift would be in a cute reusable bag like the dozens on ReuseableBags.com. Some of them are so cute, they actually make nice handbags! I in the past have also been known to wrap my gifts in brown paper bags and draw something on it, or use some sort of newspaper. I personally love to find a really good comic strip that I know the receiver would like and highlight that part of the paper somehow and make it the center of the gift. One time for my friends’ wedding I wrapped their gift in the personal ads and drew hearts all over it and something about how they wouldn’t be needing those anymore…just be creative!

As for cards, well I hate them. I think they are a huge waste of paper too. I prefer to make them when I can. (or I just avoid them altogether). I like to take old calendars, or magazines, or anything with cool pictures, and cut them out and make cards that way. Like I said, get creative…you will have so much fun and people will appreciate it so much more than some boring old card that looks like all of the other boring old cards. Actually my grandma always did something really cool…she saved a lot of stuff so she still had vintage Christmas cards she had gotten with her gifts way back when that she would cut up and make new cards out of…it was cool to see what would show up that year…and see what the cards used to look like. My mom and I are realizing that because my grandma was so frugal she was actually uber green without even trying!

We should all be more that way this year…think of gifts that people can really use and won’t end up in some landfill by next year. Which reminds me…if you get a gift that you just won’t use and you can’t return it or sell it on eBay, try putting it up on Freesharing, Freeuse, or Freecycle….they are great person to person recycling networks. I actually help run my local Freecycle and I am amazed at what great stuff is on there.

I hope this blog at least made you think a little more consciously about your gift giving this year…of course I just found this great guide on How to Green Your Gift which basically talks about all this stuff in a much more organized way.

*Beautiful photo created by Greener Magazine