Last Minute Gifts? All I Want for Christmas Is No Plastic, Please

By Jemima Kiss, Guardian UK

24 December 18

For the next few months, Jemima Kiss explores how we can all move towards a life without plastic, starting with Christmas

e all know the physical and emotional toll Christmas can take, particularly on women; it is hard bloody work. But I also enjoy making the magic happen because I love the ritual, and the nostalgia, and the gratitude. I loved it when I was a kid, when Father Christmas left sooty boot prints across our lounge carpet, crumbs of mince pies and dribbles of whisky on the floor. I loved the map he left me that Christmas morning in 1984 that led to a real bunny rabbit waiting for me downstairs. I loved my Mum’s Christmas pudding. I loved hand-making my cards. I loved giving presents. Thirtysomething years later I still love all of this, and now I unironically have Michael Bublé’s Christmas album, too.

But Christmas is also an environmental nightmare. The US produces 25% more waste between Christmas and New Year, an estimated 1m tons each holiday week that includes 33m trees, 2.65bn Christmas cards, and the packaging debris from our intensifying love affair with home delivery that will see UPS alone deliver 800m seasonal packages this year; cardboard can be recycled but not packing peanuts, air pillows or wrapping film. The $720bn consumer leviathan that is Christmas in America seems to require us to buy more, eat more, to suck up more resources than ever. It’s even noticeable from space, where Nasa’s satellite monitoring shows that US cities shine 20-50% brighter between Thanksgiving and New Year thanks to holiday lights.

A few months ago, I challenged myself to go plastic-free for a week – not buying anything made of or wrapped in petrochemicals. The experience led me to create this column, a personal look at our global plastic addiction and its effects. For the next few months, I’ll be considering how we can all move towards a life without plastic, examining everything from the synthetic fibers in our clothes to whether we can – or should – recycle our dog poop bags.

And I’m kicking it off with Christmas. This year, many of my female friends will be unwrapping beautifully made reusable cloth pads on Christmas Day. I’ve never given anyone a panty pad for Christmas before, and I’m sure it will be a first for them, too. But I included a label that explained these are made by a small women-owned business in Wisconsin called Party in My Pants that makes leakproof pads from lovely fabrics, complete with instructions to “put the nice bit against your nice bits”. Fabrics include, obviously, the periodic table, a soft fleecy starscape or unicorns. Whatever tickles your fancy.

Discovering Party in My Pants is just the latest moment of mini joy to bubble up from my personal project to cut down the amount of plastic waste our family produces. It started in June, when I wondered if we could go a week without buying any single-use plastic or plastic packaging, and quickly spiralled into Plastic Free July, and then the whole summer, and then interest and encouragement from friends and the discovery of thousands of people and small businesses all trying to work towards a goal of cutting out plastic and reducing waste. The revelation for me has been that in this age of overwhelming chaos and impending environmental disaster, it feels hugely empowering to take charge of something and make a difference in our own small way.

Early on in this project I developed the habit of questioning whether I really needed to buy something, and whether there was a plastic-free alternative. Another rule is that we reuse plastic we already have until it just falls apart, and only then put it in recycling. We refuse plastic, and reuse it, before we have to recycle it. Christmas is hard not just because there is a huge amount of plastic involved with consumerism generally, but there’s also an emotional pressure to do it right – to get the right gift, the right food, create the right experience.

I asked Robert Reed at San Francisco’s progressive, employee-owned recycling firm Recology what would encourage people to make better decisions about what they buy, and what they throw away. “I think people just need to be brave,” he said. “The fear about making a change is worse than doing it. But really it doesn’t take much courage to give up buying Christmas wrapping. You make your life simpler and get more respect from your children.”

Reed told me that the materials that cause problems are plastic-based glitter on cards and wrapping that can’t be recycled, food containers that aren’t empty or rinsed out, and those thin plastics used in delivery packaging that can’t be easily recycled and that become entangled in sorting machinery.

So, good mother elf that I am, I started my Christmas spreadsheet in October. I found out that plastic Christmas trees take 20 years to cancel out the damage caused by making them, so rather than buying a new real tree we put up our plastic Ikea tree, circa 2001. On went the tinsel and tree decorations that we shall reuse every year until they disintegrate and then replace with a non-plastic alternative.

We’re using energy efficient LED lights rather than incandescents (27w, $10 over 40 days). Homemade crackers with non-plastic, personalized gifts inside. Homemade Christmas pudding. I might even try making a panettone if I’m feeling brave.

We once had something delivered that had 12ft of brown paper around it, so I kept it and used it as my Christmas wrapping this year; part of this project necessitates a sort of Mad Maxian hoarding of potentially useful materials. I used paper string and washi tape I already had. I handmade cards using paper from a big box of scraps and spares, sewed them together and posted them to friends and family in dozens of old mismatched envelopes I’ve had for years. I know, ideally, that I’d call or email instead, but our artist family has a long-held tradition of hand-making Christmas cards that we send at year end as a small token that we are thinking of people, however busy and far away they might be.

For big presents for my closest family back home I’ve ordered tickets to great things. Mum’s going to London’s most glamorous and outrageous Christmas panto at the London Palladium, my brother’s going to see his favourite stand-up in Brighton, his girlfriend will be doing a craft course and their kids are going to a puppet show. It feels both simple and triumphantly non-material.

I asked family and friends to consider handmade or non-plastic gifts, and to email one of their favourite recipes so that we can collect them and make them throughout the year. And I spent a few evenings sewing (with no significant level of skill) dozens of mini-pillowcases from pretty leftover fabric with labels that explain these are to be taken to the supermarket and used instead of plastic bags for fruit and vegetables. I’ve already had one friend say she’s been inspired to sew a few of her own and hand these out to her friends in Bristol.

I also remembered to add a note to my son’s letter to Father Christmas, asking him very nicely if he would avoid plastic packaging on any gifts this year. Given the enormous list of Lego requests, let’s see how she does with that.