My mission to go green has given my husband a few

headaches over the past few years. We have moved on from

the arguments about whose turn it is to empty the kitchen

caddy into the compost bin (mine, permanently) but he now

has a new gripe. Since my green ‘conversion’, I am

impossible to buy presents for.

Crucially, my eco-shopper’s criteria have thrown his

Christmas-eve gift-buying dash out of whack. Under strict

instructions not to purchase anything over-packaged,

produced by child labour or in any way responsible for

harming the planet, he dived into a Fair Trade shop and

bought me a wooden owl that you blow into to make a

hooting noise. Correction: he bought me two hand-carved

owl hooters. I am not a bird-spotter; neither do I have a

particular penchant for owls (or, indeed, sounding like

one).  Guess how happy I was.

The following year I was presented with two hectares of

Ecuadorian rainforest for Valentine’s Day. It was a

lovely gesture, if slightly impersonal. Serves me right

for making a scene.

The problem, as he sees it, is not so much, ‘What do you

get for a girl that’s got everything?’ but rather, ‘What

do you give to a girl who no longer wants anything?’.

Frustratingly for him and amazingly for me – I was, in my

former life, a store-card-toting shopaholic  – I have

learned to be happy with my lot.

There is, of course, nothing like the zeal of a convert,

and for that reason I am not going to get all hectoring

and lecturing about the commercialisation of Christmas

and why our annual consumer-fest isn’t great for the

environment.

Never mind that while I train my daughter to switch off

our energy-saving lights every time she leaves a room,

other people are illuminating their properties with

electrified house-bling for four weeks of the year. We

all have an ‘evil carbon twin’ and obsessing about what

others do (or don’t) merely discourages people from

taking responsibility themselves.

Besides which, being elitist about one’s emissions makes

others feel narked. I may feel like pointing out that

those twinkly rooftop sleighs are helping to defrost

Santa’s North Pole packing station, but that just gets

you labelled a killjoy. Better to stick to the subject of

plastic carrier bags, now the shopping – sorry, festive –

season is here. At least everyone’s against them now.

Actually, I suspect 2008 is likely to have been a greener

Christmas for many of us by default, if not by principle.

With recession being talked about openly now and

unemployment on the rise, few people are spending like

they used to. This year’s ‘Buy Nothing Day’ – a 24-hour

fast from consumerism – was on 29 November, but many are

doing that on plenty of other days already. Moaning that

you don’t know what to get someone is fast becoming less

relevant than whether you can afford to get them anything

at all.

The knock-on effect is plain to see on the High Street:

'everything must go'signs plastering shop windows, prices

slashed by 50 per cent even before the Boxing Day sales

and well-known chains tumbling into the receivers' hands

one after the other like a collapsing wall of dominoes.

The papers reported a late surge in spending this week

but I suspect this isn't because people are suddenly

feeling more confident about the future. It's more a case

of 'If we're going to Hell in a handcart, we might as

well go there in style.'

However, for all the misery that the credit crunch has

brought about, it has also forced people to discover

skills and strengths they never knew they had, to be

ingenious and inventive and to reconnect with our means

of production. We are cooking again, sewing things and

growing things, as well as making things, saving things

and sharing things. Isn’t that what Christmas is all

about?

This year, I've received more homemade cards from people

than ever before - usually featuring either their kids or

their pets wearing Santa hats - and lots of charming

homemade gifts, from jewellery to jam and from cookies to

calendars (the latter from my daughter, featuring - yes -

our guinea pigs, as well as loads of holiday snaps of all

us. Predictably, I cried.)

In return, I've been making beauty products for my

friends, using store cupboard ingredients and essential

oils and herbs and flowers from my garden. I reuse pretty

jars and bottles to decant them into. This year I've

perfected my foot cream recipe as well as a skin toner

and lip balm. You can make gorgeous moisturisers and bath

salts and, tied with a bit of saved-up ribbon and a spray

of dried lavender, they make economical and sustainable

gifts that people appreciate all the more because you’ve

put your own time and effort in to them.

Sadly, many Christmas customs don’t sit well with a

low-carbon lifestyle. All that extra cooking, travelling

to see family, lavish food and having the heating on all

day can give you a big fat carbon footprint. Last year I

tried keeping our thermostat at its usual low setting but

my mother-in-law went off to M&S and rather pointedly

bought a thick sweater. She didn't come this year (due to

a family crisis, not our chilly house) but I have to

confess that, my husband, who is suffering from a cold

and feeling a bit shivery, sneakily turned the heating up

behind my back.

I couldn't be too grumpy because he'd bought me a

trombone stand (secondhand, off eBay), which I really

wanted, as well as the Mamma Mia DVD for Christmas. Did I

say I didn't want anything? Um, well, who am I to

complain?

Christmas also generates a massive amount of waste. The

total amount of wrapping paper alone is said to be enough

to cover the Channel Island of Guernsey, which, given

that just one child can fill an entire room with it,

sounds a conservative estimate to me. (I have friends on

Guernsey: it's pretty small). I guess that figure is for

the UK only. Or possibly just Wales. Or even just our

street, now I come to think about it.

You can, at least, recycle Christmas cards at collection

points in supermarkets and WH Smith, or cut them up to

make gift tags for next year’s presents, which is what we

do (that’s one form of child labour that is acceptable in

my book). I do buy charity cards, though I’ve reduced the

volume we send in favour of festive emails. For wrapping

presents I use brown paper donated to us by a friend –

ironically, it’s the outer packaging for rolls of gift

wrap! – that I tie with wool (20p a ball from the charity

shop). And before you ask, we don’t bother with boxes of

trashy crackers manufactured in China. Humbug, I say!

So what do we do? Huddle together wearing scarves and

eating dry biscuits? Not a bit of it. We normally have a

real tree, bought from a well-managed local plantation

(get it chipped afterwards, or plant it out or chop it up

and leave it in the garden to provide a home for

beetles). However, with the price of Christmas trees

being so high this year, we resurrected our fake tree

from the attic, which actually does the job fine. I

suspect it was made in China but it looks like it'll last

a lifetime so I guess that's equally green . . .

We eat lovely, local seasonal food, bought from the local

shops and from our vegebox supplier - our Christmas box

had chestnuts, walnuts and a vintage variety of

purple-skinned potatoes especially good for roasting, as

well as all the usual sprouts, carrots, parsnips, celery,

etc - and avoid the supermarket crush like the plague. I

haven't been inside a supermarket since the beginning of

November and it was such a horrible experience I vowed

never to go back again. And I haven't!

There is far less waste shopping this way - supermarket

shopping generates vasts amounts of non-recyclable

packaging, whereas our veggies come in a big potato sack

that we give back to the driver when he comes the

following week - and it's more economical shopping this

way, too, because you buy according to need and are less

likely to impulse-shop. (You can't physically carry the

stuff for a start! Though I did succumb to a box of

Turkish Delight and some spicy iced biscuits from the

deli).

The issue of food waste has been a hot topic this year,

stimulated by WRAP's 'Love Food, Hate Waste' campaign,

and Christmas can be a particularly wasteful time. We

compost everything from the Brussels sprouts leaves and

potato peelings to envelopes, (non-metallic) wrapping

paper and cardboard packaging. Cooked food scraps that

can't be turned into something else, the chicken carcass,

old cheese rinds, soggy cereal, etc all goes into the

Bokashi bin, along with a good handful of special bran

containing effective micro-organisms, and that ferments

for a couple of weeks before going into the compost, too.

(The process 'pre-digests' the food waste, making it

unpalatable to rats.)

Hopefully that means we won't be putting out any more

rubbish than usual. We average about half a bin bag a

week, often less. If we could recycle plastic and

polystyrene packaging in our area it would be almost

nothing but they don't have the facilities for that here.

Oh, and I go out carolling with our brass band, playing

round the back streets where we live in York. I’m not

making any green claims for it, but I wouldn’t like you

to think I’m a total Scrooge. There’s nothing more

rewarding than when people come out of their doors

holding sleepy children and smile and say, ‘Now it really

feels like Christmas’, even if I am developing

hypothermia in the cold.

Which reminds me, there is something I really do need

that I missed off my Christmas list: thermal underwear.

Made from organic cotton, of course. Come to think of it,

I might get some for my mother-in-law, too.