It has been a great holiday week for us and I hope you all had a great one as well.  I could think of nothing better to do with our free time than to spend it with friends and family.  Even though we may have had a break from work, there is no break for going green.  This week’s green challenge was to recycle as much Christmas wrapping paper as possible.  It has been challenging, since we have a pretty large family, but have really enjoyed following through on this task.

We took in 12 garbage bags of wrapping, bows, boxes and miscellaneous junk.  Of that, we have been able to reduce the actual scrap down to 3 bags that we will need to find creative uses for.  I think we are going to try and make some homemade paper out of that and I will make sure to keep you all up to date with our progress on that.

We collected a pile of wrapping paper and tissue that we will be able to use throughout the year.  Also, we now have a box of ribbons and bows that will be usable for us throughout the year.  We did have a small amount of actual garbage that we had to throw away and some newspaper we put into the recycle bin.

Thanks for following us this week and let me know your green Christmas story in the comments area below.  Also, stay tuned for this week’s green challenge that will be posted later today.

I hope you all had a fantastic Christmas and wanted to give you all a quick update on this week’s green task.    For those just joining us, my wife assigns me a green challenge every week and this week’s challenge is to recycle wrapping paper.  This weekend is turning out to be very hectic because of a massive snow storm (we just got stuck pulling into our driveway), family fun (getting to spend some great time with our families) and general Christmas chaos…. So it is going to be a little short.   So, we have now harvested most of the wrapping paper we will accumulate.

We ended up leaving the fam’s house a bit earlier than expected that night and think we may have a bag or two left to collect, but other than that, we have all of the paper goods at our home.  As expected, we have a large amount of paper and we are not quite sure what the heck we are going to do.

About 14 garbage bags… 14 whole bags of wrapping paper.  We have gone through one bag and we were able to redeem about half of it as wrapping paper that we can use in the future.  If this rate continues, we will have 7 bags of unusable wrapping paper.  I will keep you updated on what happens.  Please let me know if you have any suggestions in the comments area below.