by Mark Christian Mendoza || Photo Credit: Shutterstock

It’s a wonderful thing, the winter holidays, is it not? Gathering your family around the table to feast together. Dashing through the snow while singing Christmas carols. Watching wrapping paper get torn to shreds by rabid children. Oh, and of course who can forget, trashing all the uneaten food, plastic packaging, unwanted gifts, and whatever other vaguely unnecessary items you can find to add to the undying plague of environmental destruction! Ah… Christmas.

What? Don’t remember that last part? That’s not too surprising, very few people do. When you’re lost in the holiday cheer, it is not difficult to look past the piles of gift wrappers and cardboard packaging without even a single thought. Christmas carols carry quite convincing carefree climates, don’t they? And yet, as easy as it is to bury our heads in the snow, if we want to preserve the Christmas trees we love so dearly, pretending like the problem doesn’t exist won’t do anyone any favor.

They say that understanding the problem is half of the solution, so the first step of our foray into Father Christmas’ crimes is seeing just how much the cotton-clad man must answer for. Let’s start with the North Pole’s most prized product, presents.

According to the GWP Group, in the United Kingdom alone, 227,000 miles of wrapping paper are used every year. An astronomical length of wasted gift wrappers which is enough to wrap a line around the Earth more than 9 times over! As for the plastic packaging used for the actual presents, it’s estimated that around 125,000 tons of those are sent straight to landfills without even being recycled!

When you are opening your grandparents’ holiday cards, pretending to appreciate the heartfelt message instead of the gift inside, you should know that according to Envirotech, just sending those cards to you has released around 140 grams of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Across the UK’s entire holiday gift card industry, that’s a total of over 231,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions. Despite being the coldest season, it seems winter truly has some of the warmest gifts. Literally. Even if you wanted to lighten the environmental load by dropping the cards in a recycling bin, the shiny, pretty glitter that many of them contain is also pretty good at polluting paper like a plague, contaminating whole swaths of it and getting all of it thrown out! All of that environmental damage, and that is just from presents in the United Kingdom alone.

When real Christmas trees seem just a bit too pricey, those artificial trees have to kick up a stink of around 40 kilograms of carbon gas each, ten times more than natural trees, to save your wallet. Didn’t like your Christmas gift? Toss it out the window! 1 out of 5 of what were supposed to be pleasant presents end up as putrid plastic eating away at the Earth in landfills. From so hungry you could eat a horse to so full you can’t eat another bite, all those classic Christmas culinary casseroles you couldn’t stomach contribute to a total of 7.7 million tons of wasted food per year in the UK alone according to Grundig.

So, is that it then? Does that mean for the sake of the Earth, Christmas is canceled? Should Mr. Claus and his little guys in green pack up and put their gift-giving on indefinite hold? The answer is yes, but also no.

Sure, the Christmas season does produce more mountains of waste and greenhouse gases than you can shake a stick at, but perhaps it’s not Christmas that’s the problem. While it’s true that these hills of junk do appear during the winter, to get a better answer we need to dig down beneath the snow and straight to the root of the problem, and that problem is us.

The truth is that it’s our bad habits, careless spending, and reckless treatment of waste products that create all these problems in the first place. The only thing that Christmas does is dial our cheer and energy to an eleven. We buy more food than we can eat, spend money on gifts on a whim because of some flashy finagling, and toss all the plastic and other packaging in whatever container’s convenient enough when we’re done.

So, to cut down on all this pollution, what are we to do? Well, any tips that apply to year-round waste reduction apply here as well. You should try to spend money less carelessly, reuse whatever containers you find, and recycle any materials into something new and useful. However, for the end-of-year holidays in particular, here are some tips to save Christmas yourself.

Got a gift you don’t want? Don’t just throw it away. Try to sell it or pass it on to someone else! When in shops of any kind, control your spending. Many stores are designed to catch your attention with shiny posters and new products to make you leave carrying more than you planned. So before you buy anything, take a step back and think about your possible purchase. If you can afford it, try to get a real tree instead of a fake one. Its carbon footprint is 10 times smaller than that of an artificial tree. But, if you do get an artificial tree, reuse it as much as possible to make the most out of its cost to the planet. While shiny wrapping paper looks nice, you could try to put a fancy spin on your gifts by wrapping them in fabric, a much more biodegradable material.

Despite being the jolliest season of the year, Christmas hides a dark underbelly of piles of waste and heaps of greenhouse gases being released out into the Earth every time the holidays come around. Over time, these heaping helpings of trash will affect the environment and eat away at the beautiful nature of our world. To prevent this, do your part to reduce the negative effects of Christmas. Remember, as fine as the world may seem now, we are on thin ice when it comes to our future. It’s only together that we can ensure that Christmas will stay the merriest season for decades to come.