Dreaming of a Green Christmas: Eco-friendly Festivities

It's a time of togetherness, a time of cheer and a time of giving, but it's easy to forget that Christmas is also a time of gluttony and waste. What with temporary decorations, discarded wrapping paper and unwanted gifts, a huge amount of waste ends up in landfill come January.

But there is a way to enjoy Christmas and at the same time maintain our responsibility to the environment and it doesn’t mean we're reduced to giving each other lumps of coal in true Ebenezer Scrooge fashion.

Giving greener gifts is one of the best things we can do to make Christmas a little less wasteful. Environmentally friendly gifts have a two fold benefit; they're less wasteful gifts in their own right, but they also help to spread the green gospel and encourage others to think about green issues too.

Eco-gadgets make great environmentally friendly gifts for the technophiles in your life. Solar gadgets are a particular favourite as they save money as well as reduce your carbon footprint, and are also extremely useful for times when you can't plug into the mains. The Solio Charger for example, is a simple hand sized solar cell that can be hooked up to most small electrical items such as phones, cameras, and MP3 players.

For the nature lover, how about encouraging your local wildlife with a garden bat box , bug box, or bird feeder ? Just make sure you fill it with fair trade nuts and seed!

Recycled gifts are also Green Christmas friendly. Beer guzzlers will appreciate goblets made from recycled beer bottles . Take pride in a fairly traded purse made from Cambodian rice sacks, or how about the Choc-O Mini bag made in the Philippines by an award winning women's cooperative?

With these recycled gifts, not only are you giving new life to waste that would otherwise be burnt, buried or simply litter the streets and waterways, you're also helping to provide employment to an impoverished part of the world. But it's not all charity – recycling can be chic too, and many celebrities have been featured in the glossy gossip magazines clutching their eco-bags which has helped to popularise these products.

So this year, instead of dreaming of a white Christmas – why not make it a Green Christmas?