Let's get Wasted!!

Around Christmas it's hard not to get caught up in the excitement of the season and up your food intake (and often this means your bin bags getting bigger.) Christmas is a time for giving, and whilst this it is wonderful to see the joy in a loved ones face when you give them something they really wanted, it's still important to keep the environment in mind.

Now I'm not going to start preaching about giving your friends and family kitschy homemade gifts they have no use for, or buying only second hand charity shop gifts they don't really want - the whole point of this is to show that you give live a normal life while still keeping an eye on how much you send to a landfill and how big your carbon footprint is getting.

This year my family and I decided to give each other 'temporary' gifts; stuff we could use up like bath bombs and chocolates, so the house wouldn't be cluttered with things we only use once. I also wrapped all my presents in pieces of tissue paper that had been used as packaging in the past. Just tie some sparkling ribbon stuff we'd had lying around (for literally years) and I reckon they didn't look half bad. 

The food is my favourite part of Christmas (me and the rest of the world!) but it's also the time when the most food is wasted. Everyone (especially my mum) gets over-excited about how much food everyone is going to eat, how we're going to need two desserts for every day as if sitting around watching Christmas films makes our blood sugar dangerously low.

enough food to feed the whole of
Hogwarts

Although there's nothing I can really do about my mothers food shopping habits, I will be keeping my eyes on what's close to being binned unnecessarily, when it could be frozen or eaten up. I'll also be trying to remember that just because it's Christmas doesn't mean that I can pig out and put on a stone and a half. 

Aside from turning out ALL (including the pretty tree ones) of the lights when I go to bed, despite my insane family wanting to keep them on all night, I will be trying my best not to rant on about saving the planet. I'm aware that especially at Christmas people don't want to think about negative things, so I'll just have to be a bit subtle about recycling all the paper..