Have a Greener Holiday

Dec. 22, 2008 — -- Along with all the gifts given this holiday season comes a ton of wrapping paper. But there are ways for you to cut back on the amount of gift wrap you use and make your holiday season more green. Check out the tips below from Becky Wisdom of Better Homes and Gardens.

You can wrap gifts with any large piece of paper you have on hand, including: comics from the newspaper, newspaper and magazine pages, brown paper bags, old maps, wallpaper scraps, your kids' artwork.

By wrapping just three gifts in recycled paper from around the house, our combined efforts would save enough paper to plaster 45,000 football fields.

Gifts can be tied up with VHS tape as a bow. About 38,000 miles of ribbon are reportedly thrown away by Americans every year and most of it during the holiday season. It could tie a ribbon around the whole world.

That could be counteracted if each family reused just two feet of ribbons every year.

This is an easy and creative way to give a present. You wrap the bottle in newspaper. Then, use the rest of the paper to make bows on top.

You also could use mint tins for gift cards. This is a really great way to save on those envelopes that come with gift cards. You can stick the card inside a mint tin. Works great and is really creative.

Finally, you could use fabric gift bags instead of paper gift bags. Try Lyziwraps, which are gift bags made out of fabric that can be reused. They are $6-$30, compared to $5-$10 for bags tossed away.