Brown Paper Packages Tied Up In Strings, These are a Few of My Favorite Things

Here's a fun fact: In the U.S., the annual trash from wrapping paper and shopping bags totals over four million tons.

I despise buying wrapping paper. On the other hand, I love wrapping presents and having colorful presents under the tree Christmas morning. So this year I did this:

Sometimes when I'm mailed packages, instead of packing peanuts the shipper used brown paper. That brown paper makes awesome wrapping paper. Add a bow and it's beautiful! That's my favorite thing to do.

I also like using and re-using Christmas boxes and bags since they add so much color. I save them year after year. They're always good.

The red bag with green polka-dots is actually a reusable fabric gift bag. It's the perfect thing to wrap gifts in because it encourages the receiver to save a tree next year!

This year I bought some Christmas themed fabric for a Christmas craft, and used the extra for wrapping paper! Very colorful.

The beautiful blue package in the back is wrapped in wrapping paper from last year. It's not normal ripping-paper. It's made from cellophane or something. It's very exciting.

So, here is another fun fact: If everyone wrapped just three gifts in reused paper, reused bags, or fabric, it would save enough paper to fill forty thousand hockey rinks.

Don't think I'm an eco-saint or anything. While I was looking up these fun facts, I also found this one: The amount of Holiday card sold in the U.S. in one year would fill a football field ten stories high and requires the harvesting of three hundred thousand trees. Yeah, I helped murder THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND TREES. Next year, I will stick to Christmas emails.