ecobites

Making your life greener - one bite at a time.

Weeks of shopping, days of wrapping, hours of decorating and carefully arranging gifts underneath the tree -- and it's all over in a few minutes. While the kids chortle over new toys, you contend with a mountain of shredded paper, ribbon, and bows. It leaves you wishing you'd asked for a bulldozer.

Finding just the right Christmas gift can sometimes seem like an insur-mountable challenge. Luckily there are a few tricks to creating or buying just the right gift - and making Christmas giving a pleasure that is low on stress and over consumption. Remember that gift-giving isn't about the price tag, it's about the thought behind the gift and the time taken to find or make it that will make the difference. Gifts selected for thoughtfulness, longevity, and quality over quantity. Take a few moments to sit down and really think about each person you're intending to give a gift to. What are their interests? What do they do with their spare time? What genre of books do they read? What style of clothing do they wear? What do they most often talk about? What are their favorite foods/cuisine? What are their favorite colors, cosmetics, music, DVDs etc? What are their dreams, both realistic and hopeful? There is such a wealth of information that we know about the special people in our lives without even realising it.

Whether you celebrate the Winter Solstice, Saturnalia, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Bodhi Day, Dōngzhì Festival, St. Nicholas Day, Christmas, St. Stephen’s Day, Twelfth Night, Modranect, Yule, Diwali, Eid al-Adha, Sadeh or Chahārshanbe-Sūri Here are some Quotes and poem extracts to get your creative juices flowing to use in holiday projects.

Traditionally, red and green have always been the colors of Christmas, but what do they symbolise?

With a little planning anyone can give Christmas presents that are thoughtful, original, recycled and homemade that make a difference to the environment.

Try to picture a world without gifts. There would be no colorfully wrapped presents, nothing under the Christmas tree or in Santa's stockings.

Christmas gift giving is a tradition that has been passed down for countless generations.