Green Gift Giving Guide

This is a quick guide to giving and wrapping meaningful gifts (all year round) while staying true to your low-waste and low-impact lifestyle. Check out our green gift ideas and scroll down to hone your green wrapping skills! Personally, my go-to is gifting garden seed packs and I love receiving them because my loved one's choose flowers or veggies I might not have thought to use in my garden but end up loving!

GIVE EXPERIENCES

Theatre tickets, online cooking classes, apple picking voucher at a local farm (with a used, reusable basket), Altitude punch card, Squam Lake Science Center membership, Montshire Museum passes, Christa McAuliffe Discovery Center tickets, NH State Park Pass, Tour The Fells tickets, Courier museum pass, book a babysitter for a friend to have a night off, sky's the limit!

GIVE BOOKS

Books always lead to something or somewhere new, and don’t we all need that these days? You can buy them used and/or support local bookstores. Check out the GreenLifeNH Bookshelf for ideas!

GIVE CONSUMABLES

Food, syrup, soaps, candles… anything that can be eaten or used up is a good choice (the less packaging, the better). Live plants are a great choice too. Check out our Food & Recipes guide for ideas!

GIVE USEFUL ITEMS

Aim for something useful. Garden seed packs are always a hit! It’s totally socially acceptable to ask the person what she needs and to get it for her (oven mitt? umbrella? slippers?). You can choose something a bit nicer than they would have chosen for themselves and it’s a win-win. Or get a gift card. Take a look at some of the green products we use for ideas!

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DONATIONS

An incredibly meaningful gift idea is to donate money or goods to a cause that is important to your loved one. If you're not sure - go with something local like Fit4aCause -a Concord-based fitness and wellness program that supports cancer survivors in the local area - run by Renee Plodzik.

SECONDHAND GIFTING

Secondhand gifting carries a stigma that it doesn’t really deserve. Despite being secondhand, we can find some really amazing gifts that are preloved by someone else but perfect as a new-to-you gift for a special person in your life. There are so many reasons why secondhand gifting is a great idea and why we should work to normalize it.

GET CRAFTY

Homemade gifts are not only meaningful but they might also motivate loved ones to green their goods. Items like homemade soap, cleaning products, hand sanitizer, reusable snack bags and gift bags can get people thinking about making small changes towards green living (make sure to add a little "how-to" tag with your gift.

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NO GIFTS PLEASE

This year add "no gifts please" to your birthday invitations. Not only does this take the pressure off of parents to produce a gift (remember not all families can afford giving gifts at every party) but this also reduces your carbon footprint on many levels.

Green Your Wrapping Skills

Wrapping

USE NEWSPAPER

Use newspaper to wrap your presents. For years, we stole a couple of Sunday Globes from my parents mid-December and wrapped everything in that. To dress them up a bit, we would tie elaborate bows with pretty leftover yarn.

USE NAPKINS OR DISH TOWELS

Use pretty napkins or dish towels to wrap your presents. This works well when you are wrapping presents for neighbors, co-workers, and others who will probably unwrap the gift separately from you. And, you are basically giving them two gifts, which is nice.

LEFT-OVER BROWN PAPER BAGS

Use the left-over brown paper wrapping from online purchases or paper bags from the store. Brown paper gives gifts a classic look, which is enhanced with white yarn. Jolly old Saint Nicolas uses brown paper wrapping for our children.

USE SALVAGED WRAPPING PAPER

Use salvaged wrapping paper from past holidays and birthdays. This is our current strategy for gifts outside our nuclear family. We save all the gift wrap from gifts we receive, store it, and reuse it. At first we were ridiculed a bit when caught flattening out used paper, but now everyone is onboard and others are catching on (which means our supply may run out at some point).

USE SALVAGED GIFT BAGS

This is my favorite approach because gift bags are infinitely reusable. In our nuclear family, we hide presents in gift bags the morning of, “unwrap” the gifts, and then tuck the bags right back into our gift storage box. Super easy and everyone still gets the joy of “unwrapping” the gifts. Since we often have extra gift bags from years of saving them, I do reuse these outside our family too. Actually, the gift at the top is wrapped in a torn gift bag. I just cut off the bottom of the bag and it was easy to use just like wrapping paper.

GIVE UNWRAPPED GIFTS

Giving unwrapped gifts can also draw attention to your low waste choices, which can spark great conversations. I haven’t quite made it there yet (unless I am giving potted plants), but maybe someday this will be socially acceptable.

USE CHILDREN'S ARTWORK

Do you have a ton of children’s artwork lying around? You could recycle it as gift wrap. We found that large paintings from kindergarten were particularly useful for this (don’t worry, we saved plenty of art to scrapbook!).

BAKED GOODS

Choose previously-loved plates and bowls for giving baked goods. Go to the second hand store and find beautiful or holiday-themed (or both, if you can!) plates to give with cookies this year. Not only is this much classier than paper plates or tins, but the plates can be used again and again (or returned to Goodwill to repeat the cycle).

USE FABRIC GIFT BAGS

I received several of these cool new bags last year. You just slide the gift into the fabric bag, pull the drawstring, and you’re done. The bag can be reused again and again. If I had time, I would sew a whole bunch of these using scrap fabric.