Make your own greeting cards with coloured cards and coloured felt pens. You can also cut up and use last year's holiday cards as this year's gift tags.

Be creative with no wrap options. Hide that large, unwieldy gift somewhere in the house or yard. Give the recipient a card with a series of clues leading to the present.

Wrap gifts in materials that can be reused, such as string bags, baskets, tins, towels, scarves, and handkerchiefs. Why not wrap dad's gift in a tool box?

Parties and decorations

Avoid disposable dishes. Serve guests with reusable plates, cups and utensils or ask them to bring their own.

A live, potted tree can be decorated for the holidays. Plant it in your yard in the spring or donate it to a local school to be enjoyed year round.

Decorative lights should be low wattage. Decorations can be homemade. Decorate with pine cones, real holly, potpourri or other items around the house. Use your imagination!

The bottled water craze may be very fashionable, but it is no healthier than ordinary tap water and according to analysts is 10,000 times more expensive to produce.

This situation is having an alarming affect on the environment as to the resources required to extract the water from the ground, package it and distribute around the globe. In the UK alone this business is worth £2billon.

By Kat Tancock

source:  CanadianLiving.com 

As I write this, it's a balmy early spring day in Toronto...or, at least, it feels like it. But it's wintertime -- one of the warmest winters anyone can remember, at the beginning of what climatologists are predicting will be the warmest year on record.

Whether 2007's unseasonably warm winter across most of the country -- not to mention storm after storm pounding the West Coast -- is a direct result of global warming is difficult to prove, but the fact that climate change is both a reality and a threat is moving into common acceptance. And Canadians care -- a January 2007 poll by the Globe and Mail and CTV showed that 26 per cent of Canadians consider the environment the top issue facing the country, and 62 per cent were willing to accept slower economic growth as a trade-off for reducing global warming.

But what are we actually doing to help preserve the planet for future generations? Quite a bit, in fact. Here's a rundown of eight great things Canadians have done for the environment, plus suggestions for how we can achieve even more.

By Adria Vasil

Source: Canadian Living 

You know the basics of being a good green citizen: Screw in some compact fluorescent bulbs, lower the temperature on your thermostat. But if you're thinking of renovating, here are 10 ways to turn your home into an earth-friendly paradise.

The modern, environmentally friendly and durable alternative to hardwood is bamboo flooring. Being a grass, as opposed to timber, gives bamboo the edge as not only a building product (being strong and at the same time flexible), but also as a sustainable resource: wood takes approximately 15-20 years to reach maturity, whereas the non-harmful harvesting of bamboo takes a mere 3 to 5 years. Bamboo has traditionally been the material of choice in most of Asia, and it is only recently that its benefits and environmental properties have begun to be used more fully in the west.

A Straw Bale house and Rammed Earth are two such eco-friendly options we are considering. I've recently become the owner of, "The Straw Bale House" by Athena Swentzell Steen, Bill Steen, Davaid Bainbridge and David Eisenberg.

In our travels along the highway between the BC Ferries Swartz Bay Ferry terminal and downtown Victoria, we had seen the Nickel Brothers house moving company (www.nickelbros.com).

A quick look through their 'recycled' homes for sale in Vancouver area, Victoria, Nanaimo, Seattle, Everett and Port Townsend, reveals some absolutely stunning homes.

Though a number of the case studies show the transport of homes to relatively remote locations, we haven't pursued this alternative ourselves since high bank waterfront property (upwards of 100') and a long, narrow, steep, winding driveway would make it impossible to get a house up onto our property, I'm sure!