Christmas can be a wonderful time of year. If it’s something you celebrate it’s a time to get dressed up, bring out the best china, and spend time with loved ones. But how do you create the magic and sparkle for your home decor and Christmas table without it costing the earth both financially and environmentally?
My mum is very creative, and a lot of my Christmas memories are of things she’d made. The beauty of hand-made decorations is everyone can get involved in making them and so they create a family tradition. It’s something we try to carry on, with often differing levels of success!
Christmas is one day of the year when we go overboard and buy presents galore, over-eat, and revel in the twinkling lights. This year will be very different for many of us as the cost-of-living crisis continues to bite. The environmental crisis that’s dominated our headlines in recent years continues as we all feel the impact of freak weather conditions. The efforts we’ve put in place are starting to make a difference but there’s still so much more we can do.
Eco-friendly Christmas decorations
Creating your own Christmas decorations, table dressings, and wrapping doesn’t have to be expensive. Or difficult. Reusing last year’s gift bags and boxes is a good place to start when it comes to wrapping or using pieces of Christmas fabric that can be reused year after year. Cut up old Christmas cards to make gift tags rather than buying new ones.
Creating paper decorations that can be recycled once they’re past their best is a fun way of using up odd bits of paper and is something the kids can get involved with too. As is using foliage that’s fallen off trees and bushes to create wonderful table centrepieces. A Christmas forage in the woods is a great outdoor activity the whole family can get involved.
Christmas crackers
Christmas crackers are a key part of most tables and first became a British tradition in the mid-1800s. They were developed by Tom Smith, the early ones were inspired by the French bonbon sweets with a riddle added in. Tom’s sons added a paper crown and modern crackers include a gift too which can cost anything from a few pence to over a thousand pounds.
Shop-bought crackers are one-minute wonders. Once they’re pulled, the joke read out, the hat either torn or put on and the gift cast aside, they’re destined for the bin. Whilst some of the contents can be recycled, it’s estimated that over 40 million end up in the bin each year.
So, what’s the alternative?
Reusable fabric crackers are an eco-friendly, zero-waste alternative to the traditional Christmas cracker. They create beautiful table decorations and can be filled with environmentally friendly alternatives to the plastic gifts the cheap shop-bought ones usually contain.
Eco-friendly Christmas crackers
You can make your own Christmas crackers using fabric, ribbon or string, toilet roll tubes and small gifts. You could cut up Christmas clothes that are too small for the kids as the fabric, or buy end-of-line pieces that would otherwise end up in a landfill.
Handmade crackers make a beautiful addition to your Christmas table that doesn’t cost the earth, either literally or figuratively in terms of money. One set of Christmas crackers will last a lifetime if they’re well looked after. They can become a family tradition that’s passed down the family.
You can dress them up as much as you want using odd bits of ribbon, or off-cuts of sparkly fabric. Or keep them plain and simple and tie them with string. You can get the kids to write the jokes and add a thoughtful little gift like a homemade sweet or a lottery ticket. The possibilities are endless.
They don’t leave any mess and can be used as many times as you want to over the Christmas period. And then you just carefully pack them away with the rest of the decorations, to be used again next year.
Head to the eco-friendly section for more simple changes you can make that have a big impact on the environment.
