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Gifted products.
The most wonderful time of the year is around the corner, Christmas fans rejoice! But in the past decade or so, consumerism really took a hold a on Christmas. It has become a race: the bigger tree, the more presents, the fancier decoration, starting already in July… It’s simply getting overwhelming and too much. It’s definitely not very gentle on our planet. (I also have pet hate: The Rule of Want, Need, Wear, Read)
But there are plenty of ways to show your loved ones, and the planet, a little love. Buy buying from sustainable and ethical brands, being a little more mindful what and how you can change to make your Christmas greener. Traditions are fantastic, but some of them are really harmful to Mother Earth, so maybe it’s time to ditch them. But instead: let’s make up our new ones, as we are the founders of a new generation: the one that has the last chance to do something about climate change. Let’s make our new, planet-friendly traditions, share them and hopefully others will follow too.
Vegan Christmas Dinner
Like it or not, meat and dairy farms are harmful for the planet. Plant-based diet is the way forward if we want to fight climate change. Good news is, vegan food and ingredients are more and more available. I’ve recently tried Riverford’s Vegan Christmas Dinner Box and I loved it! Firstly, the nut roast is a MUST for me at Christmas, we traditionally have that on Christmas Day. (I actually eat nut roast a lot, nut just at Christmas, because it’s one of my favourite dishes.) So Riverford delivers all the wonderful, organic ingredients: fresh root vegetables, Brussels sprouts (I have a great recipe here for Brussels sprouts), vegan Christmas pudding, vegan minced pies and the nut roast complete with cranberry sauce (and Yorkshire Pudding? Yumm). All packed with as little packaging as possible and 95% plastic free as well.
Did you know, that not all wines are vegan or even vegetarian? Yes, they all made of fermented grapes but that’s not so simple!
Most wine producers use animal-derived products to act as a filter for organic particles that may be detrimental to its flavour, texture, colour or appearance. Not vegan wines. Vegan winemakers are choosing to use mineral and plant-based fining agents. This vegan prosecco from TheFoodMarket.com has been already featured on my Ethical and Green Christmas Gift Guide 2019 too, but of course it deserves a mention here too.
As for the left overs, try to save everything you can. Of course, it’s impossible to eliminate food waste completely, but with little little effort, we can drastically reduce it. I know it’s not much fun eating the same food for a few days in a row, but maybe do not over shop and over cook food and ingredients. Food waste – as we have probably all heard it lately on the news is a major contributor to climate change. Between 33-50% of all food produced globally is never eaten and that is a staggering figure. Which means that we waste lots of energy, resources and of course it’s also a moral problem. So save what you can! I’ve received these cute little sustainable bundle from Net Zero Co. – and they are also very useful for saving all bits of food!
Plastic Free Christmas Crackers
We all love Christmas crackers, they are a lovely Christmas tradition and good fun too. But mostly they are filled with plastic tat, that is not fun at all. Especially not, that they are practically single use: most of the time they end up in the bin the same evening or a few days after Christmas when clearing out all the packaging. Good news is, you don’t have to ditch the cracker tradition, you can simply buy a plastic free cracker making kit or buy eco-friendly Christmas crackers (also from TheFoodMarket.com) These crackers have a selection of wooden gifts, what’s more we think the gifts are pretty useful and your guests will want to be taking these home!
Plastic free gift wrapping
I’ve already wrote about this last year so you can find some more ideas here: 5 Eco-friendly Ways to Wrap Your Christmas Presentsbut I will add another one to this now: Tesa has a few new, eco-friendly product. Like the eco-friendly paper packaging tape and tape that is made of 100% recycled plastic. This is a really fun way to get creative with brown paper and stamps.
Ditching the glittery and shiny, ultra-bleached wrapping paper is very important, because they cannot be recycled at all, because the fibres of this cheaper type of paper are not strong enough to recycle. Also, in most of the cases, wrapping paper is made of a mix of materials added to the paper like colouring, glitter and other plastics.
Alternatively you can also opt for cloth wraps – I love those too! Any nice scarf or piece of textile would do it.
