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
If You Must Decorate Choose Natural Decorations
Tinsel is one of the most common decorations used for Christmas trees, wreaths and to add a bit of holiday charm to the bare walls of our home. What few homeowners stop to consider, however, is the environmental impact of this common Christmas decoration. Tinsel was originally made of shredded silver, which was a great way to reflect the lights from candles and add a bit of cheer to pre-electricity Christmas decorations.
Silver decorations for the Christmas tree aren’t affordable for many homes. Up until the 1970s, many manufacturers made tinsel from lead, essentially creating a toxic hazard where children would open presents on Christmas morning. Today, modern tinsel is typically made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC) film coated with a metallic finish: not exactly the “greenest” silver decorations for your tree.
If your great-grandma passed down the family line some of her original silver tinsel, then certainly go ahead and use it to decorate your tree. For other households, however, avoiding tinsel, plastic garland, and other decorations made from petrochemicals is a great way to reduce the environmental impact of your celebration. Instead of hanging oil-based products on your tree, head out to the woods with your children to collect pine cones, acorns, and dried flowers to add to your tree.
Christmas ornaments made from dried oranges and cinnamon sticks are a beautiful, natural addition to your tree and add pleasant smells instead of VOCs to your home. A simple basket of pine cones brightened with some LED Christmas lights is another natural option that brings an earthy feel to Christmas. You can even consider spending a cold, pre-Christmas morning making natural birdseed ornaments for your tree that can subsequently be hung around your yard to attract wildlife in the cold of winter. Making it a priority to avoid the cheap, uninspiring, plastic Christmas decorations is perhaps the best thing homeowners can do to make their celebrations a bit more environmentally friendly.
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.
