Sustainable Holiday Decor: 5 Quick and Easy Tips

Christmas time always makes me think of Nana. Our family is Jewish but she just loved Christmas. The second the Thanksgiving dishes were cleared away, it was time to get her house in Woodstock, NY ready for Christmas. That meant several weeks of baking desserts ahead of time, getting the ham for Christmas Eve dinner and the roast beef for Christmas Day dinner (from Ottomanelli’s, of course), shoving the car full of everyone’s presents, and driving up with Grandpa Pa, my twin sister, and I. Her Christmases were always extravagant—the biggest tree, the most beautiful ornaments—but here in the early 21st century, we need to be more mindful and sustainable about our holiday decor.

Image description: Photo of a tall Christmas tree that practically touches the brown ceiling rafters. The tree is decorated with glass ornaments in an array of colors, white lights, and I can guarantee the house’s current residents are still finding tinsel in the floor boards.

When thinking about seasonal home decor, it is important to remember these sustainable principles: what happens to the decor when it is no longer needed? What is the decor made out of? How long will it last?

According to the blog Sustainable Chic (link opens in new window), Americans create 25% more waste between Thanksgiving and New Year than usual. The best way to avoid becoming part of this statistic is to be sustainable: make decor out of materials you already have, make sure your decor won’t last forever in a landfill and somewhere, and think about how many times you can reuse this decor. The five tips below will help you create beautiful, upcycled, and long lasting home decor.

Tip #1: Edible Garlands

If you’re like my family, you probably already have the following around the house: oranges for stocking feet, cranberries for sauce, and popcorn for snacking.

For a garland made from dried fruit, you can roast the fruit in an oven at 250 degrees F for 10 minutes, poke holes in the dried pieces, and string them together with twine to make a beautiful, biodegradable holiday garland. Special thanks to Sustainable Chic and House of Jade for the idea. (Link will open in new window.)

Image credit: House of Jade. Image depicts a pine garland, a dried orange garland, and a garland of large white beads draped across a light brown wooden mantelpiece. Three bronze bells hang down from the mantelpiece.

Tip #2: Origami Ornaments

Photo Credit: Upsplash. Image of a red and white paper star hung on a lit Christmas tree with a piece of twine.

Use old gift wrap or paper from around the house to create origami stars and cranes. There are plenty of traditional patterns to choose from online and many of these models are easy and fast to make. (If you are looking for patterns, may I recommend my Mother In Law’s organization, Origami USA? Link opens in new window.)

If stored carefully, these origami ornaments can last a lifetime.

Tip #3: Embroidered Fabric Scrap Ornaments

Photo Credit: Brooklyn Haberdashery. Close up of five embroidered diamond-shape ornaments embroidered in a geometric sashiko pattern in red, white, and yellow thread. The ground fabric is green with white dots.

As an upcycled embroidery brand, we can’t recommend making your own hand embroidered ornaments highly enough. (Maybe you will want to use one of our upcoming kits to make an ornament next year?)

Brooklyn Haberdashery (link opens in new window) sold some beautiful kits this past holiday season, but you can also make your own using scrap fabric from worn out clothes and other textiles to create embroidered, hand-sewn ornaments. For extra sustainability points, stuff your ornaments with your thread scrap from previous embroidery projects.

Tip #4: Wall Hanging Tree

Looking for a sustainable Christmas tree that never sheds, doesn’t need water, and isn’t made from plastic? Brooklyn Haberdashery (link opens in new window) sold some really gorgeous tree wall hangings by Japanese artist echino/Etsuko Fuuya this holiday season and I thought it was a brilliant idea.

Image credit: Brooklyn Haberdashery / Kokka. Design by echino (Etsuko Furuya). Image of a long, narrow wall hanging of a silhouette of a pine tree. The inside of the silhouette is filled with white and grey winter patterns, creating a lively texture. The wall hanging is photographed in front of a house plant in a blue and white geometric pot.

Christmas is only three days away as I write this post but it’s never too late to paint or embroider your own tree on a sheet or other large piece of scrap fabric. Pin the ornaments to the wall hanging and voila, a beautiful Christmas tree that really does last forever and has almost no environmental impact.

Tip #5: Gift Wrap Centerpiece

Photo Credit: Eli Lu/ Washington Post. Image of a festive, multi-colored miniature tree made from scraps of wrapping paper. The tree has been placed on a window sill next to some pine cones and potted plants.

This final tip comes courtesy of Karen Hugg and The Washington Post (links open in new window). If you’ve ditched gift wrapping paper in favor of more sustainable alternatives (perhaps using scrap textiles called furoshiki?) or don’t know what to do with your leftover paper, make a cone out of construction paper and glue strips of leftover gift wrap.

This upcycled, recyclable, and sustainable mini tree would be great as a centerpiece or as decor on your window sill.

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Gone are the days when Nana would put up not one, not two, but five Christmas trees—the main tree, an artificial tree with glass ornaments that was placed on the porch, a small artificial tree from the 1950s that was hung with chocolate ornaments and placed in a dish with disgusting (but also kind of good?) hard candy, and two Blue Spruce trees outside hung with lights. But the decorations and the presents were never the important thing, as fun as they were: Christmas was all about joy, light, happiness, love, and food.

I don’t know if I’d ever be able to recapture the grandeur of Nana’s Christmases, but in a quickly warming globe it might not be possible, much less prudent. We can still have all the joy, the fun, and the food while keeping our holiday celebrations sustainable and low-impact.

Which of these tips will you use? Do you have other easy, sustainable DIY holiday decor ideas? Let us know in the comments below and may your holidays be merry and bright!