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I cannot count the number of articles I’ve read about making my own crackers or elaborately roasting nuts under a candle light for a truly vegan lunch centrepiece. If you’re anything like me, a lot of these gorgeous ideas are a bit too much to take on at a particularly busy time, in the middle of a pandemic, with kids under my feet the whole time. So here is my list of five Christmas hacks which will make your festive season that little bit greener but just as festive.

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1. Buy bags of wine instead of bottles

This is such an easy switch and will make a huge difference. Switching to wine in a box for the 97 percent of wines that are made to be consumed within a year would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about two million tons, or the equivalent of retiring 400,000 cars. It’s to do with the additional weight of the bottles being transported and the waste - bag wine lasts longer. 

We absolutely love using More Wine. They’re a British company specialising in box and bib wine and have a brilliant range - we’ve loved everything we’ve ever bought from them. This ‘Only Natural’ selection will cover the whole Christmas period and includes box, bib and bag wine in three colours - winner! 

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2. Make one of their gifts a toy rental

One of my least favourite things about Christmas is all the effort you put into choosing, and wrapping only for the kids to be completely overwhelmed by the amount of stuff, pick a box of matches up and start playing with that, forgetting all the gifts they’ve been bought. I’ve become so fed up with discarded toys and gifts in fact that we now have a monthly subscription to Whirli. With Whirli we choose toys we want to borrow, have them for a month and then send them back. No stress about needless plastic and no guilt over unwanted stuff! The toys on their site are probably better suited to under-5s. The company completely understands how busy we can be and also that things get broken, so you don’t need to be super precious. They’re also happy for you to keep things indefinitely if they’re a big hit - only switching what you want to. Postage is made extremely simple and the packaging is reused. 

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3. Don’t chuck the leftovers

Tackling food waste is one of the best things we can do to reduce our emissions as a country, and as households. Never is this more true than at Christmas when we just have too much food to manage. So, in advance, make sure you have a good Bubble and Squeak recipe, consider using your old mince pies to make brownies, and if there’s still food leftover, pop it on Olio so your neighbours can help you out. We’ve never had anything that didn’t get taken within a couple of hours. Maybe sign-up to the app ahead of the big day so it’s a super simple task when you do want to shift food. 

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