3 Ways To Go Green This Holiday Season

The holiday season is typically a very wasteful time of year, so we want to encourage you to start making some little changes that will help make this year's holiday green as well as white. While you're wracking your brain for gift ideas for everyone from your in-laws to your doorman, we think you should use this opportunity to give some gifts back to our wonderful mother earth, as well. We're not talking about stuffing your kids' stockings with energy efficient light bulbs; we've found some fun, useful gifts that are good for the planet, good for the getting, and will make this holiday season all the brighter. Here they are:

Gift of Green #1: Rock the Holidays with Love, Peace, and Cool Stuff

When going green, it can be hard to know where to start, which is why the awesome Hot Chicks at RockLovePeace created the Starter Kit for Change. Go to www.starterkitforchange.com and get an adorable bag filled with awesome eco-friendly products that is a perfect gift for friends and family or even those people in your life that you're obligated to buy gifts for but you have no freaking clue what to get. If we all take this baby step toward encouraging one other person to live greener, pretty soon we'll all be rocking with love and peace. Well, it's a nice thought, anyway, and isn't that what the holidays are all about?

Gift of Green #2: Decorate Your Home in Eco-Friendly Style

A lot of people buy new home decorations for the holidays, which is good for the economy but bad for the planet. So this year, why not buy some chic, sustainable décor from Branch? They've got everything from beautiful furniture made from sustainably forested wood and funky chairs created out of recycled plastic to classic kitchen items made from organically grown bamboo. This is also a great place to buy locally hand-made gifts, and they even have a gift registry so that you can get while you're giving back.

Gift of Green #3: Have a Healthy Holiday Party

We're all for partying and enjoying fattening foods, especially around the holidays, but what if this year you didn't slave away at your stove over a giant, fatty honey baked ham, and instead did something better for your body and the planet? Green Truck is a new organic, eco-friendly catering company that has the best organic, gourmet food that ever came out of a truck! All of their produce comes from local farmers, their trucks run on recycled veggie oil, and their kitchen is solar powered, which all means they create zero carbon emissions. Unfortunately, their services are only available in the LA area, so if you're on the west coast, go to www.greentruckonthego.com and get a holiday meal that's as kind to your waistline as the planet. And for those of you in the rest of the country, let them inspire you to find or create similar companies in your own community.

Comments

[rtolmach]

Gift of Green #4:

Your friends likely don't need any more stuff. Instead, consider making a charitable donation in a friend’s name.

http://www.ChangingThePresent.org offers more than 1,600 tangible charitable gifts. For instance, for Dad, a gardener, you might preserve an acre of the wilderness. For Mom, a photographer, you might restore a blind person's eyesight with cataract surgery. For your fashionista friend who lives for her Manolos, you can fund a pair of shoes so a girl in Africa can attend school. Hours of cancer research, solar panels for villages, meals for the hungry, books for children, medicine for the sick, shelter for the homeless. . .

No wonder the New York Times called it an “amazon.com of the nonprofit world.”

StrawberryFrog, a hot ad agency, created two fantastic videos to promote the idea and the site. You can see them at http://ChangingThePresent.org/film.