Fabric Gift Bags for Holiday Wrapping credit: Flickr emimage
During the holidays, I always struggle to find the perfect gift tailored to everyone on my list. It’s important to me that my loved ones know just how thoughtful I really am. Like the one year I gave my mom a Santa-sized bag of dirty clothes because I knew how much she loves to do laundry (seriously). This year, given the economy and my efforts to be green, I’m trying to cut out the “stuff.” For the big gifts this year, I’m trying to go with gifts of experience. Tickets to a play, passes to a local museum, gift certificates to the spa or barber for a good shave, cooking a dinner of local & organic foods – you get the idea. (To friends & family reading, guess what I’m getting you for Christmas! Not a gift certificate to a spa, sorry.) The tricky part is making sure it’s not too far away or too intense on energy, or I might be defeating the original purpose of having a low environmental impact.
One new gift idea that I just heard about is the ZeroCarbon Individual (or the ZeroCarbon Family) gift. According to CarbonFund.org, the average American is responsible for 24 TONS of carbon emissions every year! Pretty heavy. So, what’s not to love about knowing that your overall carbon footprint is being offset through reforestation and carbon sequestration projects? Ok, maybe it’s not for everyone on your list, but those that have a mind on the environment will surely be appreciative. Basically the money you donate will be put towards a project that plants trees (which absorb CO2), avoids deforestation or promotes renewable energy or energy efficiency – your choice! Given that each person’s carbon footprint varies, this gift of carbon neutrality is really an estimate. You can also consider just offsetting someone’s car use or home energy use, too.
There’s a lot of controversy about carbon offsetting – many claim it discourages people from reducing their carbon footprint in the first place. People can just emit all the carbon they want and then assuage their guilt by offsetting. My first goal is always to reduce as much as I can, and then offset what I can’t.
To-Go Ware in Avocado
And for those that want to encourage their light green friends (who may not be all that thrilled by your gift of zero carbon) toward the dark side, To-Go Ware makes a really cute and useful gift. They sell reusable bamboo utensils that come in a portable pouch – a cool way to eliminate your use of disposable silverware when you’re on the go. Hey, Oprah likes them. If I do give any “stuff” this year, the plan is to use reusable materials for wrapping. In addition to the usual paper gift bag that always gets reused, I found these cool fabric bags that you can use for wrapping. You can get them from places like BAGGU or LuckyCrow.com, or you could even make them yourself. It looks easy enough. Now where’s the closest fabric store?
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What a great idea to reuse gift paper!