Jennifer Basye Sander - Green Christmas: How to Have a Joyous, Eco-Friendly Holiday Season

Christmas is a magical time of year. Close your eyes and think back on your best holiday memories. Chances are they don't have to do with elaborately wrapped gifts but instead involve moments of laughter at an old family joke, a snowy night of caroling with friends, or the sudden appearance of an unexpected friend. Wonderful moments of love, fellowship, and community.

Here's an idea: why not make this the year you give yourself the gift of enjoying a less stressful, less costly holiday season? One in which there are just as many, if not more, happy memories to treasure in the future. How is that possible? Simple go green.

We promise you that, in the years to come, you won't look back on this holiday season, your first green Christmas, and wish you'd gone to the mall more often, spent more lavishly, and left the lights on all night long. Whenever you waver in your resolve to cut back on the lavish and focus on the simple this season, go back to those same warm memories of Christmas Past. They'll remind you why you're making a change.

This book is an invitation to join us in going green this holiday and beyond. It's the perfect time to begin living more lightly on planet Earth. The traditional concept of Christmas as a season of love and reflection fits in beautifully with your desire to help the world by making changes in your lifestyle. Many churches and faith-based groups are making protecting the environment a part of their year-round message, and this past spring the pope added destroying the environment to his list of sins. Adopting the simple green mantra of give more, consume less is a Christmas gift we can give to future generations. Give more of yourself and less of what's wasteful.

A real change is afoot, and many Americans are already eco-inclined, able to see that for the health of the planet we must make changes in the way we think and live. Peter and Jennifer Sander and Anne Basye lead lives that are probably a lot like yours. Peter and Jennifer are trying to raise a couple of happy and healthy young boys in a somewhat suburban setting in a pretty ordinary town. We don't live on a commune, our house isn't built from nontoxic materials, and we aren't raising all of our own food. As a family though, we are trying to do a better job of being citizens of this planet. We aren't green experts by any means (although come to think of it Peter was in charge of the campus recycling program in high school), we are ordinary Americans who know we all need to start making changes, both big and small, in the way we live so that our children, and their children, can continue to enjoy the beautiful world around us.

Peter and Jennifer have always been a frugal pair. We try to ignore the constant advertising drumbeat and instead focus on only buying things that we truly need, rather than what we (or our two young boys) want. We look around the house continually to consider what we can reuse, repurpose, or recycle.

Of the two sisters behind this book, Jennifer and Anne, Anne is even more frugal. She lives in a conventional building in a big city Chicago but does her best for the planet by not owning a car, recycling everything, and buying very little that is new. At Christmas, she favors recycled Christmas trees. (Read more about that in Chapter 5.)

Anne's son Alex is in his twenties, well beyond his rush-to-the-Christmas-stocking years. Where Jennifer and Peter have the expertise on nuclear family holidays, empty-nester Anne is an expert on friends-and-extended-family Christmases. Her presents and parties are for grownups.

This book is stuffed full of holiday-themed ideas on how to live lightly on the planet by making your own gifts and cards, wrapping presents in eco-friendly ways, and entertaining without waste. To get your family to join in willingly, you can also bring those things up at the table and let everyone toss out their own creative ideas on how to use (or reuse) what you have.

Some of the ideas will seem familiar. Why? Because a lot of green ideas are just basic good neighborly ways to behave. Rideshare to a holiday party? Sure, you do that anyway. It's called a designated driver! Offer to swap party clothes with a girlfriend instead of buying new things? It's called friendship, and you do it all the time.

Changing Your View

What is Christmas all about? This is a perennial topic in women's magazines and inspirational editorials. Every year we are exhorted to remember the reason for the season and then we forget, buckling under pressures to conform.

A CALL TO ACTION

Give yourself an early gift right now. The gift of forgiveness. If you are just now starting to live a greener life, don't look back and beat yourself up for your old lifestyle. Instead, just look forward to how much greener things will be. Don't throw up your hands and say, There's nothing I can do to make a difference.There is. Start now.

The cost of conforming in the United States is great. Every year between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, Americans generate 25 million extra tons of garbage (about 25 percent more than during the rest of the year) and spend billions of dollars on purchases that may trigger an uptick on Wall Street but leave consumers burdened with more debt.

Cramming too many events into too few days is another cost of conforming. You know what it feels like to be so overextended and tired that it's hard to enjoy the holidays. Conforming to a conventional Christmas harms you and harms the earth. To explain why, let's take a moment to examine global warming.

A Short Overview of Climate Change

As we were writing this book, Anne heard a meteorologist and an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council present a really great overview of global warming. The weatherman, an old pro at making complicated weather phenomena comprehensible to the average television viewer, explained that