Following suite of my article Greening up Christmas: Paper Waste, I figured it’d be fun to evaluate other methods to make Christmas greener this year.

Lets take a look at gifts.

• Home-made gifts are always the way to go for Christmas. I make a mean cherry brownie with home-made cherry chocolate ganache. I’ve seen other people knit scarves, make pendants, whatever you can put together with love is a great gift idea.
• Donate your time. Are you pretty handy with a skill? A cousin of mine donated his time to rework some of our electrical work in our old house a few years back. Another person I know donated a free tarot reading as a gift. I could certainly donate a web design or two to a friend who I know needed one.
• Donate to charity in a friends name. Always a popular choice, you could always donate to a charity fund in your friends name. My family has a lot of diabetes, so donating to the diabetes fund would be especially touching for them.
• Regift. I actually like the concept of regifting. I mean sometimes you just get a gift that you don’t like or wouldn’t use. Why not put it to good use and give it to someone would could appreciate it?
• Give a gift of time. A day at the spa, or a day at the golf course are excellent eco-friendly gifts as well. Consider them like gift certificates of time to your loved one.
• Giftcards. Though not a very personal gift, Giftcards help prevent unwanted gifts that might end up being thrown away or cluttering up someones house.

Also check out some of Care2′s Consumer-less gift ideas.