| A recycled Christmas.... |
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Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you're all enjoying the holiday festivities, food, friends and family. I'm in an excellent mood this morning, eating a decadent breakfast of leftover pudding and cream while reflecting on my efforts to have a green christmas. My first year hosting turned out to be quite a learning experience. Firstly, Christmas will be considered 'ruined' if you only serve tofurkey - no matter how good the recipe! On advice from everyone who attended I did end up serving meat - a free range/organic turkey from Ceres. Their local food connect service also provided all our berries, veggies and the pudding and I can't recommend them highly enough - delicious! We will return to our weekly food box from their program in the New Year. Decorations consisted of the many solar lights we were gifted last year, and a household full of flowers and green cuttings from the garden as well as bowls of cherries and apricots as our trees are having an excellent crop this year! We have a live pine tree that doesn't particularly like being indoors but can handle it for the few weeks during Christmas... and of course poinsetta brings in the traditional Christmas colours for a more traditional theme. I hand made the bonbons this year out of toilet roll inner tubes (properly disinfected and lined), recycled paper and some party poppers from the party shop... The added advantage is a better quality of jokes! And gifts were cut back to a minimum with our family kris kringle... We stuck to experience gifts as well - cricket coaching, dinners out, cooking classes and comedy tickets, made much easier with websites like scoopon, jumponit and zizzle (to name but a few)! For friends, baking, vodka infusions, plant cuttings and my secondhand books brought smiles to many faces and I didn't have to step food inside a shopping centre the entire season! The one thing I couldn't find and ran out of time to make was cloth napkins! We ended up with paper which I deeply regretted... and will double my efforts to learn how to sew this year for the next dinner at our place. And of course I must give many thanks to my friends who pooled together to scout for chairs in hard rubbish that I was able to clean up and use to seat all our guests! I've included below some of my favourite recycled crafts of the season: 
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