Have an Eco-Friendly Christmas

Whew! I am done Christmas shopping! Well, almost. I cannot buy Acouchi's present until Christmas eve, so I don't have that done, but besides that, I'm done! I think this is the soonest I have ever finished. I made my last run today and I am all set! In fact, most of the presents are already wrapped and delivered/mailed! Drek's stocking is all stuffed, Ash's stocking is all stuffed...Hooray!

Besides getting done early, I did two things differently this year;
One, I made a lot of the presents. I'm not usually one for homemade gifts (lack of talent mostly) but this year I made quite a few. In fact, I am still working on three homemade gifts.
Two, I wanted the wrapping of gifts to be as un-deadly-to-trees as possible. I have always despised wrapping paper. Not only because it's like wrapping your presents up in death, but also because I have to pay for wrapping paper. Seriously? You want me to spend money on paper? No thanks. So usually in December I get paper bags instead of plastic and cut them up to make my own wrapping paper (I got this idea from the Sound of Music. Brown paper packages tied up with strings is now one of my favorite things). This year, however, I've been using cloth bags for my shopping so I didn't have the abundance of brown bags. One of the packages I ordered used a huge piece of brown paper, rather than packing peanuts so some presents were wrapped in that. Mostly my presents are wrapped in Christmas boxes. On Freecycle I found a women who was giving away old Christmas boxes, so I picked them up. She had a HUGE bag full of Christmas boxes! Between that and the Christmas gift bags left over from last year, I didn't use a single scrap of wrapping paper! Merry Christmas trees!

I think my presents look quite festive: