Celebrate Green Blog

Yesterday, our guest blogger, Marilyn Brackney, offered some great ideas for decorating wrapping paper for Hanukkah. Today, more suggestions.

Containers

Make an Animal Bag
Curve the top of a plain, brown bag by cutting off the corners. Fold it over about three inches to form the face. Use construction paper scraps to create the animal’s features, and glue them to the bag. Fill the container with shredded paper. Place your gift inside, and fold down the top.

Decorate an Oatmeal Carton
Empty oatmeal cereal cartons make great containers for gifts. Just use a glue stick to fasten a paper covering to the box. The container can be reused for another purpose.

Wrap a Cardboard Tube
Place a small gift inside a paper towel tube. Wrap and tie the ends with ribbons or curled paper.

Make a Cardboard Box Anew
Carefully take apart small paper cartons, like the boxes in which teabags or aspirin are packaged. Many of them are plain and white inside. Decorate and then glue them back together with your design on the outside. Line them with tissue or shredded paper. You can also study how boxes are folded and constructed, and use them as patterns to make more boxes.

Baskets
Visit second-hand stores to buy baskets at reduced prices. Line the basket with tissue or shredded paper and place your gift inside.

Flowerpots
Place shredded paper inside clean, terracotta flowerpots. If you wish, paint designs on the pot with acrylic paints.

Tips and Tricks

A good source of clean, pre-consumer waste paper is your local print shop. Ask the printer to save end rolls and sheets of leftover paper for you.

Your local newspaper may sell or give you end rolls of plain newsprint which you can decorate in many ways.

Interior design and paint stores receive wallpaper sample books on a regular basis. When their suppliers introduce new papers, the old books are no longer useful. You can use pages from a wallpaper sample book to wrap small gifts. Ask the decorator at your local paint store to save books for you.

Department and specialty stores often sack merchandise in bags decorated with beautiful designs. Save them, and when you’re ready to wrap gifts, cut them open and use them like regular wrapping paper.

Whether you celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas, or Kwanzaa, recycling paper to make gift wrap and containers will save money, natural resources, and landfill space. Use the suggestions as they are or change them to fit your needs. However you celebrate this time of the year, have a happy holiday!

This is a guest post by Marilyn J. Brackney, a professional artist and teacher. She hosts The Imagination Factory, an award winning website that encourages children to reuse and recycle materials to create art.

Lynn Colwell and Corey Colwell-Lipson are mother and daughter and authors of Celebrate Green! Creating Eco-Savvy Holidays, Celebrations and Traditions for the Whole Family, and founders of Green Halloween®.