How to Take Climate Action at Home this Holiday Season
Last Updated: Feb 26, 2025With the end of year holidays just around the corner, millions of families across the country are rushing to decorate their homes with a bit of festive cheer. From Christmas lights to tinsel and garland, Christmas trees to door wreaths, chimney stockings, and Santa setups, our homes, neighborhoods, and businesses indeed undergo quite a transformation this time of year.
Holiday decorations do add to the festivity, joy, and spirit of Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanza, and other end-of-year celebrations. However, they also come with quite a substantial environmental footprint. Anyone who has loaded up dozens of garbage bags of empty boxes, torn-up wrapping paper, and discarded bows and ribbons once the festivities are over should understand what we're getting at.
Caring about the environmental impact of your holiday celebrations, however, doesn’t mean that you have to settle for a colorless, austere, and dreary home. Below, we offer a few ideas and suggestions that will allow your “white” Christmas to also be “green.”
Table of Contents
- Choose Your Lights Carefully
- Christmas Tree Options
- If You Must Decorate Choose Natural Decorations
- Be Ready to Compost Your Food Waste
Christmas Tree Options
People have been bringing evergreen trees into their homes to celebrate the holiday season since at least the 16th century. The smell of pine, cedar, or fir trees inside the house certainly brings a sense of warmth and holiday ambiance. A Wall Street Journal article finds that “Americans cut down 15,094,678 Christmas trees in 2017. Growing all those trees requires about 19.7 square miles of land.”
That certainly might seem like a lot of deforestation to bring a small tree into our home for a few weeks each year. The alternative of plastic Christmas trees, however, is not much better. In terms of carbon footprint, research from the British Carbon Trust discovers a natural Christmas tree that ends up as splinters for woodwork or burnt as firewood has a 3.5 kg CO2 carbon footprint. Artificial Christmas trees, almost always made from plastic, have carbon footprints that reach 40 kg of CO2. You would have to commit to using your plastic Christmas tree for at least 12 years to make it comparable to a natural tree.
The best option for families with a little bit of spare space in their yard would be to spend a little more money purchasing a balled-in burlap Christmas tree. Instead of being cut down, these trees are dug up from the roots. The roots are subsequently enveloped in a burlap sack. Once Christmas is over, the tree is planted in a yard or tree line to continue to grow and sequester carbon over its lifetime. How cool would it be to say that your home has a “carbon-positive” Christmas tree decorating your living room?
Tobias Roberts
Tobias runs an agroecology farm and a natural building collective in the mountains of El Salvador. He specializes in earthen construction methods and uses permaculture design methods to integrate structures into the sustainability of the landscape.
