A Green Tip For Christmas Cards

I like both giving and receiving Christmas cards. It’s such a simple way of letting someone know you’re thinking of them. If you’re a Pagan who likes to send cards for Yule and Christmas, I highly recommend the Christmas and Yule cards produced by Hedingham Fair. They’re the most beautiful and reasonably priced Pagan-themed Christmas cards I’ve come across to date. Purchasing greetings cards can also help to support small, local businesses, and these days a lot of them raise money for charity too.

But I do appreciate that there are environmental concerns surrounding Christmas cards, which is often something that Pagans in particular worry about. It can be a rather wasteful tradition. How many people out there have simply thrown away their cards after Christmas because they don’t know what else to do with them? I know I have – until I came up with a way to re-use them in a practical manner.

I simply cut them into gift tags! I ALWAYS need gift tags. I end up wrapping up a lot of Christmas presents so I need some way of labelling them to make sure they go to the right person. Gift tags can be surprisingly expensive to buy new (such is the way with the gift industry!). This way I save money as well as recycling the cards. I just cut mine into rectangles and tape them on to the presents, but you can easily holepunch them to put a ribbon through, cut them into more interesting shapes or decorate them.

Making Christmas cards into tags for next year’s Christmas presents has become something of a post-Christmas     tradition for me. I get all my cards, sit down in front of a nice seasonal movie, and get cutting! It’s enjoyable to re-read them all as well before cutting them up, and I like the thought that rather than just throwing the cards away, I’ll be passing them on in another form to someone else, as well as doing a small part for Mother Earth.

Naturally this isn’t simply limited to Christmas cards. I’ve also made birthday cards, Valentine’s cards, housewarming cards and anniversary cards into gift tags.

Of course this isn’t a perfect solution. You do end up having to throw away the parts of the card that you aren’t using for the gift tag. I try to put these into the recycle bin. And it doesn’t help solve some of the other environmental issues of Christmas traditions, such as the waste generated by wrapping paper and packaging.

Do you have any tips or tricks for making your Yule and Christmas more green? Feel free to share in the comments!