Reuse holiday cards

 -- Reuse : Holiday Cards --

I was really impressed this year how many folks I've seen reusing old holiday cards in a variety of ways. "Holiday cards" can apply to baby showers, valentines, xmas, etc. So most of you already know that we have a good sized section in our Trash Talk - It's Easy To Be Green book series that talks about greening celebrations and holidays, reusing of packaging and wrapping and cards and envelopes, etc. so I'm not going to repeat any of that here right now. For those of you interested in this just go to our Store page of our website. 

Anyway I thought I'd discuss this concept a little today since the xmas holiday is closing and people are putting away their card displays. Someone gave us a jar of brownie mix this year - now the dry ingredients were layered to look really quite decorative and the lid was topped with a circle of festive cloth and a ribbon. The instructions were on the back of a holiday card... they had cut of the image, the first page of a card and because most people don't write on the back of that page it is free of print. So this person used that cut out section to write the ingredients out for the brownies and tied it to the jar with a little ribbon. It was super festive, and we really enjoyed the brownies! The jar would have been reusable for us, but was the wrong kind of lid - really narrow (I think a widemouth canning jar would have been better, or something like that would be a better option). However it was a fantastic example of how to give something meaningful that has very little impact on the environment and is very frugal.

Another person used the same front page of cards to cut out circles and attached them to items with a ribbon - as labels. It was really festive with the curly ribbon and didn't need any other wrapping. 

Here are two fantastic sites I found today that I think our readers will really get a kick out of:

http://lewister.hubpages.com/hub/recycleholidaycards

http://www.wikihow.com/Recycle-Christmas-Cards

Find Dave and Lillian Brummet, excerpts from their books, their radio program, blog, and more at: http://brummet.ca * Support the Brummets by telling your friends, clicking those social networking buttons, or visiting the Brummet's Store - and help raise funds for charity as well!