by HL Borden

Created on: December 13, 2008

While the glee and delight on our children's faces while opening their holiday gifts can bring a smile to our lips, the immense piles of wadded paper wreaks havoc on our environment. Yet handing over a holiday gift in the plastic bag it was bought in just doesn't have the same magic. What is an earth-loving parent to do? Get creative. There are many great ways to reuse paper products that are easily found around your house to makEvery year the phone company drops another five pound behemoth on our doorsteps. Often, the outdated one gets pushed to the back of the drawer to collect dust. But all that glorious yellow paper is begging to be reutilized as gift wrap.

Say, for instance, you bought your son the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle of his dreams. Why not wrap the gift in pages from the Martial Arts section? Or what if you are giving your best girlfriend some expensive soaps and candles? Cover it with the Holistic Healing pages. Personalized golf balls for your husband? Sports Equipment pages would be great.

You can even make a game out of the chosen pages to stretch out the present-unwrapping excitement. Everyone can look at the yellow pages that were chosen expressly for their gifts and make guesses as to what could be inside. It adds to the fun and makes the gift wrap a bit more personalized all while sustaining the environment.

BOOK DUST JACKETS

If you're like me, dust jackets on books are more of an annoyance than a necessity. Instead of throwing them away, save them for gift wrap. They can be used in much the same way as the phone book. You can personalize the wrap to each gift recipient by using dust jackets of the books that remind you of them.

Have a girlfriend who always seems to be dating the wrong man? Wrap her present with the jacket from your old copy of He's Just Not That Into You. Your mother-in-law is a big fan of thrillers? Use your old Dean Koontz jackets for her gift. It tidies up your house while reusing something that would have otherwise been thrown away.

COLORING BOOKS

Kids love to color. But what do you do with those charmingly imperfect, colored outside-of-the-lines pages after they've been hanging on your fridge for a month? You guessed it.

Use Little Suzie's all-purple rendition of Strawberry Shortcake to wrap Grandma's present. It'll be like two gifts in one; the present you bought and a homemade expression of love from the grandbaby. You can even get the kids directly involved by having them color pages of their own choosing for each recipient. They will be bursting with pride when Dad is presented with his gift wrapped in special pages that they colored just for him. Kids are going to color anyway, so you might as well reuse their art in an earth-friendly way.

These are just three quick tips to save both money and the earth by not buying the expensive gift wrap you see at the store. There are many more items you're sure to find around your house that can be reutilized in this way. It is limited only by your imagination.

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