Green your gift wrap

I’m one of those weird people who love wrapping Christmas presents. I actually look forward to it. I can remember many pre-Christmas evenings spent by the fireplace in my parents’ house with my sisters, watching “White Christmas” and wrapping presents. While dreaming and making plans to be Vera Ellen when I grew up, I competed with my sisters for the best-wrapped gift of the year. (My sister, Abby, would usually win that competition.)

Now, I have a new competition — with myself: How can I make a beautifully wrapped gift that’s also environmentally responsible?

I hate keeping extra clutter in my house that I don’t need, but something I do save is used wrapping and tissue paper. When that old paper has wrapped its last gift and it’s time to buy a new roll — don’t. Here are some tips to greening your gift wrap.

n Be creative. Look around the house and find another way to wrap it. Can part of the gift itself be the wrapping? Last year, my sister (Abby, the creative one), wrapped her gift to me in a beautiful scarf.

• If you have to buy it, be mindful of the product. If you must purchase a new roll of wrapping paper, look for a product with recycled content or with the Sustainable Forestry Initiative logo. Stay away from paper with glitter and other “extras,” as these things make it nonrecyclable.

• Use gift bags instead of boxes and paper. I used to think bags were bad because they didn’t take any work to wrap — “where’s the love in that wrapping?” But bags are incredibly easy to reuse, and you can customize them year to year with different tags and ribbons — made from organic or recycled materials of course. I like the plain, brown paper bags because they can be used for any occasion — Christmas, birthdays, baby showers, baptisms — and you get to be creative and have fun personalizing it.

• Try making bows and ribbons from recycled materials. Part of the fun is seeing what you can make with things you already have — this will help reduce the strain on both your holiday budget and the environment. Fabric bows can be made from old sweaters (like the one you accidentally shrank in the dryer last winter), T-shirts or jeans. Paper ribbons can be made out of strips from the glittery wrapping paper you saved from last Christmas (paper ribbon curls up with scissors just as well as that plastic stuff you buy at the store — try it!).

After your Christmas morning rituals this year, remember to take care to neatly roll or fold the glittery paper, bags and tissue and tuck them away to reuse next year. Reuse what you can and recycle the rest.

Americans toss out an extra 25 million tons of trash over the holidays, largely due to packaging. I encourage you to be creative and see if you can help lighten the load this year.

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