Green Gifts for the Holidays

Are you starting to feel like the holiday season has become more of an excuse to increase retail sales than a time to spread love and good cheer? Interested in helping protect the greatest gift of all, our planet Earth? Manufacturing the new gadgets exchanged at Christmas uses resources, and the energy burned to make, pack, and transport them translates into emissions. There are actually plenty of green gift ideas out there to help us share the Christmas spirit with friends and family without accumulating junk and contributing to environmental problems. Here are a few quick tips.

#1 Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. We try to follow these three R's year-round, and Christmas is no exception. When shopping for music, movies, or books, find a second-hand bookstore, record store, or thrift store that sells guaranteed used materials, and you'll save on price and avoid the environmental impact of a new item without sacrificing quality, keeping useful things out of landfill.

#2 Handmade Gifts. Use your skills to make a personalized gift. Whether you knit, crochet, do woodwork, paint, quilt, do ceramics, make jewelry, or compile mix CDs, the time you spend on the gift and the thought you put into it are sure to tickle the recipient.

#3 Buy locally. Not everyone has the creativity to turn a sock into a sock puppet or cloth scraps into a totebag, but local craft fairs and specialty shops make handmade crafts available and affordable making it easy to stimulate the local economy. Local specialty foods like (organic) jams and preserves and all-natural mixes for baked goods and winter drinks are also sure to please and often come in decorative, reusable jars.

#4 Share a special experience. Not all gifts come wrapped up in a box. Tickets to a concert or the theater, a massage, a city tour by Segway, a tour of a historic park by bicycle or on horseback, or a weekend getaway in a rented hybrid vehicle are all memorable ways to mark the holidays.

#5 Give a plant. What locks carbon dioxide away and breathes out oxygen enriching the air? Plants. Whether its a sapling for a neighbor's yard or a houseplant for a suitemate's desk, local garden centers carry a wide variety to suit anyone on your list- for an apartment-dwelling coworker who cooks, maybe a sage plant in a window box- and nurturing a growing plant brings anyone closer to nature in a lasting way.

Alternative gifts also bear a mention, and can range from sponsoring a gift of livestock or seeds for a community in the developing world in the name of a loved one, to a donation to a local food bank or homeless shelter in place of a traditional gift. Try musthavegifts.org from World Vision to choose a gift that that will make a real difference somewhere in the world. Carbon offsets are also a good option for the environmentally-conscious friend who as everything, as are yearly memberships with organizations that support good causes (the Virginia Young Democrats Commonwealth Club, for one).

'Tis the season to give generously without giving up on a commitment to a lower impact on the environment. Consider the miles your gift travels, the energy cost of using it, its durability, the finite or renewable resources its made of, and aim for zero waste and zero emissions. With a little care and creativity, it is easier than you might expect to make your Christmas shopping earth-friendly and inspire others to do the same.