Eco Christmas Crackers

We are loving this idea from Hayley the Trash Talking Mama, the best thing is you can fill them with little eco gifts like our lava bracelets or car air fresheners. To find out about all of her fantastic eco tips follow her on Instagram and read her articles in My Green Spot.

Christmas can be a very wasteful time of year but it doesn’t have to be that way. Use it as an opportunity to gift sustainable products and share eco-friendly ideas.

This year I am on a mission to boycott Christmas crackers which are often made of un-recyclable materials and are usually filled with plastic junk that goes straight to landfill.

Either do without them or purchase quality, sustainable ones like the crackers available from hopper.nz/Christmas. Or why not make your own using paper towel rolls wrapped in reused or recycled paper? Tie them with string or reused ribbons and maybe decorate them with items of nature, such as a clipping of pohutakawa – a task for the little elves in your family perhaps?

If you want the ‘bang’ to go with it then cracker snaps can be purchased cheaply from craft shops such as spotlight or just go without to avoid the packaging involved there.

This way you can choose desirable gifts to go inside the crackers that people will actually want to keep and use. Ideas are measuring tapes, soaps, tree of life lava bracelets, essential oil car air fresheners, chakra lava bracelets, baking, tweezers, mini screwdriver sets, sewing kits, and beeswax wraps.

Instant Kiwi tickets could be a fun idea and to keep the festive cheer you can write your own corny jokes to pop inside with handmade paper hats. To get on Santa’s ‘Extra Nice’ list you could enclose a printout of a donation to a charity on the recipient’s behalf, such as an immunisation for a child in a third world country or seeds for a family in poverty – available from worldvision.org.nz/smiles.

A creative idea is to insert pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that guests can then collectively assemble together as a fun family past time. Question some of the Christmas traditions that your family have and create new sustainable ones that can be passed down the generations in a healthy world.

Hayley Crawford