For this Christmas season, Kristin and I wanted to try to be a little more environmentally friendly with how we wrap our presents. Wrapping paper can be expensive and it generates lots of needless waste…plus we thought it would be fun to make our own!

I brought in some old issues of the New York Times from my office and Kristin got together some water based acrylic paint and stamps. We tuned into the Ella Fitzgerald Holiday channel on Pandora and got to work.

Here’s some of Kristin’s wrapping paper:

And here’s mine…

As you can see, mine is strikingly different from Kristin’s. I go for the more…abstract look, I guess you could say. It was actually a lot of fun doing this and it was really easy to set up, do and clean.

Now we have some presents under our tree!

I love Christmas!

In the U.S., an additional 5 million tons of waste is generated during the holidays. Four million tons of this is wrapping paper and shopping bags!