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October 25, 2007
I'm Dreaming of a Green Christmas
In my efforts to reuse, reduce, and recycle, in recent years I've harbored more and more guilt about the amount of waste that occurs during the holidays. I love, love, love, boxes and bows and pretty wrapping paper. I'm sorry, but plain brown wrappers with raffia just doesn't cut it. So what's an aspiring-to-be-green girl do? Well, I hadn't thought of this, but what about draping your house in LED Christmas lights instead of strings of incandescent bulbs? They're safer (no heated filament to set your Douglas Fir ablaze), last about 50,000 hours, and use a lot less electricity. According to the company that sells these, "A recent EPA report determined that if only 20% of American households switched to LED Christmas lights for the average 30 day holiday period it would conserve enough energy to power 200 households for an entire year." Not bad.
I do have fond memories of my father swearing and stepping on lights as he tried to untangle ten identical sets and discover the one blown bulb that was keeping the whole thing from blinking properly; a tradition we've done our best to continue in our own home. Actually, we have enough lights to cover a modest tree, though we rarely get our own due to extensive holiday travel. Last year I sent Adam out with a budget for enough lights to decorate the front of our house, and instead he came home with an entire Christmas tree. He had stuffed it in the back seat of the Saturn, and there were pine needles everywhere. "It looks like someone raped a pine tree in my car," he quipped, which made me laugh so hard that I had tears in my eyes. Not that rape is funny. It isn't. Happy holidays!