Here it is.  The end of another year.  After tossing challenges at you like crazy, I’m here to announce that The Greener Christmas Guide is coming to a close.  It’s getting packed away with all of the garland and pretty lights (though I’d secretly love to paint more sheets of blueprint wrapping paper!).  No need to cry.  We can do it again next year. 

So for now, why don’t we take a look at all we’ve done this year?

First we talked about Christmas cards and the 300,000 trees cut down to make them in the United States alone.  I decided to send digital cards to our family and friends, and some of you looked into recycled and paper-free card alternatives.

We brainstormed some not-made-in-China gift ideas.  It seemed a little daunting, but it turns out you can find lots of yummy foods and awesome gifts made right in your own community, including wine and champagne perfect for New Year’s.

I found a local nursery growing over 3,000 breathtaking poinsettias just a mile from my parents’ house in the US.  We brought home two of the beauties and couldn’t have been more pleased with our local purchase.

Handmade gift tags were lots of fun, too, weren’t they?  Many of us gathered scrap paper and bits of fabric that were heading to the garbage can.  Then we decorated our very own gift tags.

I shared some of the green Christmas gifts we like to put under our tree like yummy lotions and the things that bring our family together every holiday like board games.

The day after Christmas, we got busy with our thank you notes.  But we didn’t use any paper or ink.  We sent digital thank you notes with pictures of us enjoying our new gifts!  Several of you posed your new babies in their clothes and gifts; I think that’s just swell.  How many hearts did ya’ll melt?

Finally, yesterday we looked at our stacks of old holiday cards, and many of you quickly offered to donate old cards to St. Jude’s for children with cancer to turn into new cards.  Those cards are going to be repurposed into new cards for next year.  Are you thinking what I’m thinking?  I know where I want to get my paper cards to send to my grandmas! (the only people who don’t do digital)

A plastic bag takes thousands of years to break down.  If they had styrofoam in Jesus’s day, we’d still be looking at it.  And all the standing trees that don’t have to be cut down… just know that I’m proud of you.  Mother Earth is proud of you.  And one day, I know your kids will be proud of the green you.

Happy New Year, everyone!

(images from referenced pages of Making This Home)

This post is a part of A Greener Christmas Guide, a series of posts dedicated to celebrating the holidays with a lighter impact on the earth. For more of this series, please visit A Greener Christmas Guide.

As we prepare to pack up our ornaments and Christmas decorations, a lot of things can be saved for next year.  But what about all those Christmas cards we received?

One of our fabulous readers, Christy, has just the solution for recycling our cards.  She says:

A few years ago I learned about a neat way to recycle Christmas (and birthday, etc) cards. I cut them in half, and still toss the backs of the cards in the recycle bin, but I send the card fronts to the St. Jude’s Ranch for Children, where children with cancer use them to make new cards, which are sold and the profits go back to St. Jude’s.

What a great idea, huh?  St. Judes is accepting old cards until February 28, 2009.  Just pop them in an envelope and mail them to:

St. Jude’s Ranch for Children
Card Recycling Program
100 St. Jude’s Street
Boulder City, NV 89005

You can also check out their website to order some of these re-crafted cards.  For an $8.00 donation, you get 10 cards for just about any holiday.  Wow.  Easter is already coming.

Thank you for the fabulous green tip, Christy!

Now what about all of you?  Do you have a fantastic way we can reuse old holiday cards instead of dropping them in the trash?  Please share one and all!  Every little bit helps, after all.

(Image by bhg)

Want a glimpse into a European Christmas on American soil?  My mother-in-law hosted a fabulous Christmas and put out all the stops to bring us a true Czech holiday.  This was my first Christmas away from my family and away from the American customs I’ve grown up with; it couldn’t have been any better.  Want the nitty gritty of a Czech Christmas?  Here goes…

Christmas Eve

Everything is done on Christmas Eve in the Czech Republic (and most of Europe).  The entire Advent season is a huge preparation for Christmas Eve.  You eat your big meal, open gifts, and do everything Americans typically do on Christmas day.  My mother-in-law has an exchange student from the Galapagos Islands.  When he asked what we do on Christmas day, she answered, “Nothing.”  To Czechs, Christmas day is just a day of no work and being with family.  The holiday celebration is mostly over.

Christmas Dinner

Dinner is carp.  (I nervously referenced this upcoming dinner to you when we arrived in the US.)  If your American family is anything like mine, you absolutely never ever eat carp.  It’s the throw-back fish on fishing trips.  Never, never touch carp: that’s what I learned.

Not for Czechs.  Carp is a delicacy that you treat yourself to once a year.  Carp lives in barrels of fresh water for a month to flush their systems, and many Czechs bring the live fish home and keep them in their bathtubs until Christmas Eve.  The fish are very bony and full of scales, and you can imagine the macho scene of fetching the live fish from the bathtub when the men bring it to their wives.  My mother-in-law skips this entire process and buys carp filets at a Vietnamese market in Denver, Colorado.

Czechs fry the carp, put it in soups, and cook it with a brown sauce filled with nuts and vegetables called “black sauce”.  Its got to be the blandest fish I’ve ever tried to be honest.  (But it’s worth giving up vegetarianism for one day to experience a little culture, for those of you loyal readers who might remember our vegetarian Thanksgiving.)

Carp is accompanied by traditional potato salad and a sweet Christmas bread called vánočka that is absolutely delicious.  Some of the best Christmas cookies I’ve ever had are Czech.  We ate Vanilkove Rohlicky (vanilla crescents) throughout the night.  There’s a recipe for bread here and cookies here if you’re interested in melting into a bit of Czech heaven.

Superstitions

There was no throwing salt over our shoulders, though many Czechs are extremely superstitious.  They believe you can see your future (and greatly influence it) on Christmas Eve.

Attending Church

As far as I know, Czechs go to church on Christmas Eve like most Europeans.  The Czech Republic has a high population of atheists, so it really varies from family to family.

Exchanging Gifts

All gifts are exchanged on Christmas Eve.  If you have young children at home, Baby Jesus helps St. Nick deliver gifts.  Jesus rings a little bell, signaling to the children that he has come.  The gifts are waiting.

Under communism, people got in the habit of saving everything, so we did not rip open our gifts.  We carefully unwrapped them and saved the paper for another Christmas.  This is a great place for some handmade gift bags, huh?  At the end of the night, we had NO trash!  It was amazing.  

We finished the night with wishes for a Merry Christmas.  “VESELÉ VÁNOCE!”  If you want to know about day to day life in the capital of the Czech Republic, you’d enjoy this Peek Inside a Prague Home.

In the meantime, Martin and I hope you and your family had a loving, memorial holiday filled with traditions of your own.  

(Images from ArchivRadio, The Lewis Family, and My CR.)

This post is a part of A Greener Christmas Guide, a series of posts dedicated to celebrating the holidays with a lighter impact on the earth. For more of this series, please visit A Greener Christmas Guide.

At some point in the coming week, each of us is going to have to sit down and write thank you letters.  What a wonderful season it’s been!  Some of us love this next step (me); some of us dread it (my husband).  So this year, I got an idea.  We were so successful with sending our Christmas cards online and  making wrapping paper out of blueprints that I thought we should cut down on our waste one more time:  we sent thank you emails.

I know what you’re thinking.  How lame.  How impersonal. But not so!  I think it’s one thing to say, “Oh I love it!”  It’s another thing entirely to show it.  After all:

A picture is worth a thousand words.

So we decided to roll up our sleeves and keep green.

1. We pulled out the camera and started snapping photos with us and our new treasures
2. Martin downloaded the shots
3. I got busy sending personal thank you notes and attaching photos

What about at your house this season?  The comment section of this series has included so many wonderful ideas from all of you.  Now you wanna spill a few more thoughts?   Any green or fun ideas for sending your thanks?

If you decide to share digital thank you cards with your loved ones, won’t you share the love and tell them about this little article?  Happy holiday recovering!

(Images by Katie for Making This Home)

Christmas around the world is beautiful.  There’s no question about it.  But after seeing some before shots of the Christmas markets in Berlin, I didn’t know about you, but I was dying to see some pictures of Christmas in Germany.

My friend Vica put together a special treat.  She’s a talented and kind woman from Romania who currently lives in Berlin.  I love looking at photography on her blog, fotogravika, over and over.  And every so often, I accompany one of her works with my poems on Making This Home.  I hope you all get the chance to view her work.  She does everything in English – how cool is that for all of us?  She’s seriously amazing, as you can see…

Frohes Weihnachtsfest  (A joyous Christmas celebration)!

I’m inspired now.  I need to make some Christmas cookies or make a few more ornaments (and quit staring at all of those delicious roasted nuts)!

What about you?  Any must-do holiday excitement floating around your house?  And truly, are you drooling with envy over Vica’s talent like I do?

(Images by Vica at fotogravika)

When we left Germany for the holiday, crews were proudly working throughout the city to get ready for the Christmas markets.  I have often heard people say that Christmas time is the best season to visit Germany.  There is spiced wine, happy children, and handmade Christmas crafts on display.  I love the smell of roasting nuts and imagine the cinnamon and laughter.  One American friend told me it’s the sort of celebration where you just want to go every day.  You want to smell everything… and buy everything.

Germany brought us the Christmas Tree, Silent Night, and some amazing Christmas cookies – what a fantastic place to celebrate, I imagine!  In the meantime, this is what I saw before we left:

You can find Part 2 of this series during the Christmas market here.

Interested in more German holidays?  See an inspiring autumn farmer’s market and the ever-popular St. Martin’s Day celebration.

(Images by Katie for Making This Home)