The polar ice caps are melting before our eyes. Artificial snow will not be de rigueur this year.
Even as whales starve because of the plastic they have consumed, and landfills swell beyond all reason, one age-old holiday tradition that has been hard to shake is the habit of excess.
Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, Americans produce a colossal amount of waste, throwing out, by some estimates, 25 percent more stuff than they usually do, over one million extra tons of garbage each week. Food waste is a contributor, and so is traditional wrapping paper, the kind pocked with glitter or coated with plastic for that festive sheen, and therefore unfit for recycling.
According to the National Environmental Education Foundation, each year, on average, we discard 38,000 miles of ribbon, $11 billion worth of packing material and 15 million live Christmas trees.
Glitter, tinsel and shiny wrapping paper are now signs of the apocalypse, judging by the #zerowasteholidays and similar hashtags that are blooming on Instagram. These reveal a new world made from orange-peel garlands and ornaments fashioned from dried apples and dehydrated citrus slices. Indeed, desiccated fruit would seem to be a badge of responsible style.
Wrapping paper is penitential: a slurry of brown, linen and hemp (brown craft paper, supermarket bags, scraps of fabric or newspaper) and embellished with cinnamon sticks, eucalyptus leaves and other twiggy items.
There is a lot of twine.
“There will be moral judgments on what’s under the tree this year for sure,” said Marian Salzman, a trend spotter, author and early public-relations promoter of Giving Tuesday, which retailers have sometimes turned into a shopping boondoggle that conflates consumption with charitable donations. “If I see shiny green, red and silver paper, I am going to think, These are not good environmentalists. These people don’t realize the world is on fire.”
Sustainable holiday décor has been a best-practices policy of environmentalists for decades. But now that the signs of climate change are blazingly, meltingly evident, those quaint Earth Day era tenets — reuse, reduce, recycle — seem compulsory; the least one can do.
When Abbye Churchill’s rescue dogs shredded her sheets a few weeks ago, she saw a decorating opportunity. Ms. Churchill, 35, is a textile artist and author leery of waste and always on the lookout for fabric she can salvage and repurpose, and so she tore the soft pink sheets into strips and began stitching them into a garland that now embraces her holiday tree.
Textile refuse is her particular bugbear, and for years it has been her mission to harvest, scrounge and locate discarded fabric and clothing, along with dead stock from fashion companies, and rework these orphan scraps into beautiful new pieces.
The Enviro-Elves
Ms. Churchill is one in a cohort of makers, amateurs and professionals, dedicated to a sustainable holiday this year: a redemptive, perhaps pre-emptive, precursor to sober January.
Think comestible and compostable, as Antonia Pitica does, when you trim your tree and adorn your table. Ms. Pitica, 28, is an owner of Eco Roots, a company in Aspen, Colo., that sells objects like bamboo toothbrushes and rose gold razor handles, and she is an enthusiastic promoter of dried citrus as a decorative garnish.
Tiffany Threadgould is a designer in residence at TerraCycle, a company that collects single-use items, including toothbrushes and juice pouches, and teams up with companies to convert the material into usable objects.
She can show you how to make a snowflake ornament from an Entenmann’s Little Bites Muffins box, a strand of holiday lights using toothpaste tubes and gift bows from food wrappers. But she is less bullish on her mission, as the realities of the global waste market grow more dire.
“Upcycling is a stopgap method for things that exist, but we really need to be thinking about ways to stop garbage before it becomes garbage, to embrace the reduce and reuse part of the three Rs,” Ms. Threadgould said. “As for holiday decorating, I still typically do it with the mind-set of upcycling, but I look to materials that have more value. Maybe it’s less single-use plastic and more things that have a chip in them.”
She has lately made a candelabra from battered teacups, and salvaged cookie cutters during a clean-out of her mother’s home of 30 years to use as napkin rings.
“I have taken stripy sweaters and turned them into Christmas stockings,” she said, “and I’m still making light fixtures from soda bottles and old surveyor’s tripods, but I’m in a purge state right now, and going forward I don’t think I want to make too much more stuff.”
How do you understand zero waste? Nora Abousteit, whose company, CraftJam, offers workshops in all manner of crafts, including wreath making, calligraphy and wooden ornaments said, “for me it’s not plastic and something I can reuse. Or I’ve already used.”
The Amazon box, this year’s scourge, is good for “snowy city landscapes” — cut them out and paint everything white, Ms. Abousteit said — or slice up old Kleenex boxes, as she does.
Use a darning needle and colored yarn to stitch craft paper together and elevate your wrapping game. Slice toilet paper rolls into discs and pinch and glue them into star shapes. Walnut shells can be packaging for tiny gifts, like a Borrower’s cunning innovation.
“The thing about holiday décor is that anything can be material,” said Ms. Churchill, the textile designer. “I’m a big fan of grocery store fliers and newspaper.”
She also felts old sweaters, using a small-scale needle felter, to make ornaments. “You just stab the needle into the sweater and it starts to mat and then you can cut it into shapes,” she said. “You could do it watching TV and get out a lot of aggression.”
Ms. Churchill usually buys houseplants to use as Christmas trees, though she said she has reached maximum capacity in her Brooklyn apartment and this year may employ her rubber plant. “It’s gotten pretty big,” she said. “It might just be its time.”
Most cities collect Christmas trees and chip them into mulch; and the trees themselves are a renewable crop. Yet their production involves resources like water and sometimes chemical additives like pesticides, along with fuel to harvest and deliver them. It’s complicated.
An unlikely solution to the Christmas tree problem is to procure an Evergleam, the hipster-kitschy aluminum tree and midcentury artifact now celebrating its 60th birthday. Early selling points were removable limbs that slid into a sleeve and a telescoping trunk, the whole contracting into an easily stored box.
Such innovation preserved the trees so well that it prefigured their revival. You can find hundreds, perhaps thousands, on eBay, in a range of prices and in seemingly perfect condition.
The Aluminum Specialty Company in Manitowoc, Wis., made between three million and five million trees before ceasing production in about 1971, said Joe Kapler, the lead curator at the Wisconsin Historical Society, which shows off its collection of Evergleams in an exhibition each holiday season.
“It’s amazing how they’ve made a comeback,” Mr. Kapler said, adding that his show is now in its 10th year, and ever more popular for its immersive, Instagrammable settings — a complete replica of a midcentury living room visitors are encouraged to use as a selfie backdrop.
But don’t call the Evergleam an artificial tree, Mr. Kapler said mock-sternly, dismissing the plastic pine facsimiles that began to appear in the late ’60s. “It’s an aluminum tree,” its very own genus.
Go-Go Goes Eco
Those who throw parties on a grand scale have been educating themselves in sustainability for decades.
Materials for the Arts, for example, a program run by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs that accepts fabric, furniture, paper products, art supplies and more and donates those materials to nonprofits and schools, is now 40 years old and long a beneficiary of the city’s post-gala surplus. You too can think creatively about the afterlife of your own at-home props.
David Stark, a brand experience designer in New York whose clients include Target, “Saturday Night Live” and Uniqlo, is particularly skilled in low- or zero-waste productions. “If you’re going to throw stuff away, or not store it to repurpose for another event,” he said, “what would it be like if the stuff told a story and then had a life after you used it?”
For a recent party given by the skin care brand Kiehl’s, Mr. Stark’s team built a juice bar from enormous cardboard mailing tubes and misfit fruit, the bruised and imperfect fruits that are discarded by growers as unfit for supermarket produce.
Afterward, they gave the tubes to the Bronx Zoo so the tigers could use them as toys. Yes, they became tiger toys, and yes, there are photos. (You’re welcome.)
“We’ve been trying to save the planet since Greta was in kindergarten,” said James LaForce, a public relations executive, referring to Greta Thunberg, this year’s Time magazine star.
He and his husband, Stephen Henderson’s annual holiday party, with a guest count that hovers around 800, is a good place to search for sustainable decorating tips.
They have been hosting it for 20 years and are scrupulous about their waste habits. They cater it themselves, with Mr. Henderson doing all the cooking, and they pride themselves on producing as little food waste as possible.
“We always bring several boxes of Ziploc bags to the party, in case there are leftovers and we send everyone home with goody bags,” Mr. LaForce said, adding that all the food is bite-size hors d’oeuvres or cookies. (Things that are half-eaten, and scraps from Mr. Henderson’s cooking are collected and driven in their Tesla to a compost pile near their house upstate.) “Yes, we are using brand-new Ziploc bags for this. However, at home, we wash them out in the dishwasher and reuse them until they have holes.
“Similarly, we reuse and repurpose a lot of the costume elements from our annual tableaux vivant,” Mr. LaForce said. “We’ve used the same Santa costume every year for the past decade, and at this year’s party, which will be at Judson Memorial Church and is a memorial service for Santa, we’ll use the costume again, even though Santa will be in a coffin. We keep all our serving pieces, décor elements and costumes carefully stored and labeled: ‘doctors’ uniforms,’ ‘sailor,’ ‘barnyard animals’ in our basement upstate.”
But the real décor at this holiday party will be the go-go dancers, bedazzled with black Speedos and body paint in the form of black and white candy canes. “We always have go-go dancers,” Mr. LaForce said. “Doesn’t everyone? So, each year, I diligently collect the Speedos from the dancers at the end of the night so they can be used again the next year.”
Pressed on this point, he admitted: “There has been Speedo loss.”
Beyond a profligacy with men’s bathing suits or a stubborn fondness for sparkly paper, the wasteful behavior that is a true mark of this holiday season — and a more reliable engine of our doom — is the proliferation of Amazon boxes piling up on doorsteps and in apartment lobbies.
As Ms. Salzman, the brand expert, said, “This is the last year where gifting is even going to be appropriate.”
She was not talking about reviving the pious holiday practice of the last decade of buying a baby goat in your daughter’s name for a weaving collective in a third-world country and proclaiming that transaction on a holiday card that obviates the need to stuff her stocking with a pair of Madewell jeans.
“We are talking about less is more,” Ms. Salzman said. “And less can be nothing.”
