The holiday season is when we see consumerism at its finest. From the Christmas trees to the stocking stuffers there things in between that we fill our holidays with that end up being trash from the very beginning. I never really ever feel like its necessary to wrap a huge gift with a roll and a half of paper that's going to end up in the trash after its no longer used to hide a package. I get a strange guilty feeling when I start having to wrap my gifts which is why I'm glad I'm only giving one present and one present only this year. It may not be fair to those on my Christmas list from last year, including my kids, but I have a good enough reason, plus, I'm trying to green up my Christmas this year .

I know exactly what you mean. There is so much waste from Christmas that people don't think to recycle. My family likes to used gift bags and we reuse each one at least once before recycling. We also make sure to recycle out gift wrap, if we have any.

Perhaps an even greener approach is to not fret over the packaging, and focus on the products we are buying themselves. Are we buying beautiful things that will last for as long as we can imagine? Or are we buying the latest toy, perhaps using electronics mined from the Congo amidst a Civil War, and then manufactured by Chinese children? Sure, it's not fun to think so seriously, and reusing paper is great, but we're gunna need to really shift our thinking beyond wrapping paper...