Sustainable Tips for Christmas Day

Leftovers? We love them.

So, the big day is nearly here! You’ve got everything sorted, Christmas dinner is prepped, the gifts are under the tree…now you can really relax. Go on, brew a tea, have a sit down and chill out properly because we’ve pulled together all the last-minute tips you’ll ever need to be more sustainable this Christmas day, so you don’t have to have to worry about it.

Christmas Lights

The UK throws away around 500 tonnes of Christmas lights each year…try and repair them before disposing, but we love using fairy lights all year round to be honest to create a cosy atmosphere. Hanging them round your living room or bedroom windows, or even pop them in some empty glass bottles for rustic looking DIY home accessories.

Festive Leftovers

Christmas dinner is arguably THE highlight the day, right? We spend the entirety of December deciding what the main meal will be, what we’re having for dessert, telling somewhat funny but heart-warming cracker jokes round the table to the family…and often piling our plates way too high.

It’s easily done, and yeah per household there will be a few veggies here and there to pop in the compost bin but including everyone into that scenario soon adds up. In the UK, each Christmas, we collectively end up throwing 11.3 million potatoes, 7.1million pigs in blankets, 740K Christmas puds, 263K turkey’s and enough gravy to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool. So we challenge you to think twice before throwing away those perfect leftovers!

We challenged our own team to come up with their top tips on how they spice up their leftovers, and these are the results:

• Brussel Sprout Bubble & Squeak - packed full of essential vitamins! Chop them up with some onions, mix into some leftover mash potato & fry off in little patty sized cakes for a tasty side dish
• Roasted Veggies Soup - roasted or boiled, however your leftover veg comes, whizz them up with some vegetable stock and voila…a delicious, rich soup OR fry them off in some spices for warming pasta or curry dish
• Salted Maple Nutty Breakfast Toppers – sprinkle leftover nuts and dry fruit onto a baking sheet, slather on some maple syrup and a dash of sea salt…and bake in the oven! Add a teeny bit of chilli flakes for a more savoury snack with a kick
• Double Roasted Tatties - add chopped onions, a pinch of thyme and a drizzle of olive oil and crisp up in the oven. Just like double fried chips, but better
• Christmas Pudding - the good news is that Christmas pud is great for freezing crumbling it up into some fresh custard/vegan almond custard ready to be frozen into ice cream

DIY Wax Wrap

So you need to store your leftovers! We pulled together an easy tutorial of how to create your own zero waste wrap which the whole family can get involved in. The best thing, is that you can reuse the wrap time & time again. Find out how to create here.

 

Excess Wrapping

If you’re lucky enough to receive any of our Beauty Kitchen gifts for Christmas, then you may have received our Reusable Cotton Gift Bag or Tin with your treats! We created these with reuse in mind so you could use them again & again. It would be our dream, but obviously not all your gifts will be from Beauty Kitchen (imagine though!). So what do you do with all the leftover wrapping paper?

Get creative! Creating some decorative bunting or streamers, either for now or to pack away to decorate with next Christmas, is something everyone can join in with. Here’s our favourite DIY tutorials. https://www.hobbycraft.co.uk/ideas/gifting/12-ways-to-use-leftover-wrapping-paper Some other quick ideas include, creating origami figures, wrapping plain notebooks to personalise them, shredding it into confetti or parcel filler!

Recycling tip: the ‘Scrunch Test’ will give you a hint to whether your wrapping paper can go in your general recycling bin. If you scrunch the paper into a ball and it stays, odds are it can be recycled if the plastic tape is removed, whereas if it springs back then it can't be.

Trees for Life

The star of the show! If your preference for Christmas trees is of the artificial variety, great, you can pop it away for next year…and the year after that, and so on. Reuse at its finest. Yes, getting out the ladders and shifting around the loft requires effort to store them away, don’t let us discount that, but with real Christmas trees - it generally requires the effort to leave the house.

If you’re tree can’t be replanted, try to visit your local waste centre as most have arranged drop-off points for real trees, where they can be shredded and reused as wood chippings in parks for example.

Re-Gifting

Received a present that you are completely grateful for, but it’s just not your taste? Re-gift it! Pass the present on to someone you know will get more use out of it than you rather than demote it to the back of your cupboards. Gifting to charity is also a lovely option to consider too, there are plenty of places to donate your gifts - even by the checkouts at your local supermarket.