You can find lots of articles about how to have a green Christmas this time of year. Most of the authors seem to assume that being eco-friendly at Christmas is a new concept. Plenty of articles end with the advice to keep up with all these new habits in the new year.

I would prefer to think that most of my readers try to be green all year. Unfortunately, it’s too easy to get sidetracked in the hustle and bustle of the holidays.

The “most wonderful time of the year” becomes the most wasteful and hardest on the environment. It doesn’t have to, provided we don’t let the urgency of the season make us forget our green habits. Here are some thoughts on shopping and entertaining.

You have occasions to give gifts all year, but at Christmas, you buy more presents for more people. Whenever you shop, you have a chance to make eco-friendly choices or choices that are bad for the environment.

The eco-friendly choices matter more at Christmas simply because you shop more. They begin with where you decide to shop, in a store or online. Both have environmental advantages and disadvantages.

1. Consider the packaging

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Whether you shop in a store or online, consider how much packaging your purchases have.

Think of the box and all the various kinds of inserts as trash you have to buy. You probably can’t use it for anything. You have to put it right in your trash or recycling. 

So whenever you have a choice, choose the product with the least packaging. It’s one of the biggest and most avoidable obstacles to being eco-friendly at Christmas.

2. Plan ahead (shopping in stores)

Try to avoid getting in your car, going to one store, and driving back home. As much as possible, combine errands. Then plan your route to make the shortest possible driving distance.

Start and end with the stores closest to home. Visit any others in the order that gets you progressively closer to the last one. Good planning can save a lot of gas.

Shopping at locally owned stores not part of a big chain keeps money in your community. These stores can compete with the big boxes only by offering products they don’t carry. They are also more likely to have locally-made and/or hand-made gifts.

Oh, and don’t forget that supply of cloth bags you keep handy. They’re not only for groceries.

Do you feel like popping in somewhere for a snack? Stay out of the drive-thru lane.

3. Plan ahead (shopping online)

Order early enough that you can use regular shipping and avoid two-day shipping, which adds to the environmental costs of whatever you buy.

Also, consolidate purchases wherever possible. That is, don’t order a single product one day and another the next. The more things you buy on one order, the less packaging you’ll have to dispose of. Not to mention minimizing the energy of extra trucks delivering them to you.

Consider having online purchases delivered to your workplace. Chances are that the delivery company would be stopping there anyway.

4. Conserve energy as you cook

An electric stove has large and small burners. Whenever possible, cook in a pan that can go on the small one. When you’re cooking for a crowd you’ll need the large one more, but we’re talking about staying eco-friendly at Christmas. I like to think you know that the small burner uses less electricity.

By the way, I don’t need the large burners for anything but my largest skillets and soup pots.

If you cook with gas, make sure the flame never curls around the edge of the pot. Only the flame directly under it actually heats what’s in it.  The excess gas burns without accomplishing any useful purpose.

When you use the oven, your package or recipe probably says to preheat the oven to a certain temperature. Don’t. Unless you’re making pastries, heating an empty oven only wastes energy. Otherwise, the oven will rapidly come to a temperature too hot for bacteria to ruin the food. After that, it can take five or ten minutes to reach the set temperature. You can leave the food in the oven a little longer than the recipe says. But it probably won’t be necessary.

If several dishes cook at the same temperature, cook them at the same time. But minimize the number of times you open the oven. An open door can quickly drop the temperature in the oven by 25-30 degrees. It takes energy to heat it up again.

5. Minimize food waste

I am not one to tell you that you’re an enemy to the environment if you’re not vegetarian or even vegan. But whatever you serve, buy according to the size of the crowd you’re feeding, not the tempting displays in the stores. Food waste is a year-round scandal.

You want to have enough food to satisfy everyone. You probably want some leftovers, but not so much that you can’t eat it all before it goes bad. The freezer is your friend, but not everything freezes well.

Eliminate plate waste by serving small portions and encouraging people to get seconds if they want more to eat.

Compost as much waste as you can rather than send it to the landfill. Be sure never to pour fat, oil, and grease down the drain, garbage disposal, or toilet.

6. Find alternatives to wrapping paper and other single-use products

Wrapping packages and shopping bags account for about 80% of the excess waste we generate at Christmas. Wrapping paper makes up almost half of all paper used annually.

It’s not recyclable. Your only choices are to send it to the landfill or compost it. And you can’t compost the metallic papers.

Before about a hundred years ago, if anyone wrapped presents at all, they used plain brown paper­­––the kind paper bags are made of––or newspaper. Both of them are recyclable.

Gift bags make an even better choice. After the gift exchange, collect the bags, keep them, and reuse them. I have also seen references to fabric wrapping “paper,” which is reusable.

For meals and snacking, it can be tempting to break out paper plates, paper napkins, and plastic table service. It also burdens our landfills. Prefer anything that can go in the dishwasher or laundry. Compared to everything you had to do to prepare the meal, it’s not that much extra work.

Being eco-friendly at Christmas also involves other ways of not wasting electricity, gas, or water. If you want more tips, I wrote a comprehensive list a few years ago.

Photo credits:

Christmas dinner table. Photo by Miia Ranta. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons
Styrofoam. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons
Parking lot. Some rights reserved by User:Elf.
Woman cooking. Some rights reserved by Steven Depolo.
Food waste. Some rights reserved by Nick Saltmarsh.
Gift wrapping. Some rights reserved by torbakhopper