Christmas Madness

                                Christmas Madness

If Christmas is anything at your house like it is at my house than after opening presents you are left with piles of wrapping paper, bows, cards, boxes and other packaging items. Here are some ideas of ways to reuse some of those items rather than just tossing them in the garbage or recycle bin.

                                                Image http://www.treefeathers.com/miniref/images/Vcards.JPG

Wrapping paper-

Some ways to reuse your wrapping paper are to shred the paper and use it in packaging other gifts or for shipping products.

Another idea is to use the wrapping paper for projects like origami. You can also cut out pictures of penguins, stars or cartoon characters to decorate dull notebooks – or make decorations for next Christmas.

Another use for the left over paper is for cleaning purposes. Growing up, my mom would always use newspaper to clean some surface and wrapping paper would just the same and it saves using paper towels or having to wash cloths.

I like to save the bows for gifts I will give throughout the year or at times I have used them in scrap booking projects that I do.

           

                                                                Image http://craftydaisies.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/cards-after.jpg

Christmas cards-

One thing that old cards can be used for is to make tags for next’s years gifts. Take some of your cards and cut out the parts that you like into tag size and place them with your decorations to use next year.

Cards can also be used in any Christmas scrap booking you may do, cutting out who they came from and any message they send and using it in your scrapbook is an excellent way to always have the memories.

                                                           

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Christmas tree-

You can even recycle your Christmas tree in useful ways. One way is to take all of the needles off the tree before disposing of it and use the needles as air freshener in your house. One way to do this is by adding to potpourri you may already have or by even making pouches and filling them with the needles and placing them around your house.

Christmas tree needles can also be used to restore balance in a compost heap – they’re rather acidic so they balance out alkaline things, like wood ash.

What do you use your left over Christmas items for?