Oh the Irony!

My family has a long tradition of us all gathering at my parent's house, with their 7-8 foot tall perfectly decorated Christmas tree and living room for Christmas morning.

(Yes, the tree is always perfect. My parents will spend up to an hour at the tree lot looking for the one that satisfies all their criteria. Noble fir? Check. Branches not spaced too close or too far from each other? Check. 7-8 feet tall? Check. Enough of a crown at the top? Check. Then my mother will literally spend a few hours carefully wrapping the lights around the branches of the tree so that you can't see the wires at all. It is really amazing and beautiful. I am both in awe of it while at the same time wanting to roll my eyes.)

Around the tree will be presents. Lots of presents. It's rather ridiculous, the amount of presents there are. And they will be divided into piles for each person, because it got too hard to search among the many boxes for a present for each person -- we take turns opening presents, going around in whatever circle we've happened to arrange ourselves in that year. So all the presents are in piles according to the "to:" name on the tag.

Every year I spend plus or minus 2 months agonizing over Christmas presents. Making sure that I have spent an equal amount of money on each person, picked just the right present(s) for each person, etc. Painful, really. Not to mention that I feel pained when looking at my bank statement.

So last year we all said, "let's ditch this and just go to a sunny place for Christmas!" Whoo! So we're going to Cabo, Mexico this year. Pretty cool. I think we're bringing our stockings, though, and just doing very small presents in our stockings. (Which will be cool and interesting -- the stockings are my favorite part of the whole Christmas ordeal, particularly seeing what pratical, functional item my mother has decided we all need that year. One year it was Sharpie pens in various colors. Another year it was toothbrushes. Last year it was Tide stain remover pens.)

Last year I was struggling to figure out how to make my gift-giving more environmentally friendly. I was still feeling a bit new and overwhelmed when it came to the eco-scene. I did manage to wrap all the presents in paper that I had leftover from previous Christmases, so that was good. I did a few other things along those lines.

But this year I am eco-chick! I have lots and lots of ideas for green gift giving. And we're not doing presents this year. Pout. I have some ideas for the stockings such as these cool things, but I guess I don't get to play jolly green Santa this year.


P.S. My friend just wrote a great blog post on ditching disposables! She a lot of the products she mentions comes from Zola Goods, for which I am an Independant Coordinator. Whoohoo!