A Practically Crafty Red and "Green" Christmas

It's Christmas time and no one has money. The economy is in the crapper. The planet is in the crapper. I was in the crapper last night myself (stupid glairegg full feast of temptation), three times to be exact. The point is, this Christmas I am pulling out all of my practicalities and craftiness to make this Christmas as cheap as possible and as green as possible.



Crafty Thing #1

This advent calendar is way cute and I made it myself thankyouverymuch!


Crafty Thing #2

I am making many gifts this year with my own two hands. I made four Christmas gifts for a whopping 15.00. Awesome. I will post pictures later for these items.





Green Thing #1

I have been trying for a long time to figure out a good substitute for wrapping paper because it cannot be recycled. I LOVE wrapping paper so this has been particularly hard. for birthdays I have Justin draw or color a picture on large craft paper that can later be hung up as artwork or recycled. I though maybe we could do this for Christmas but we are all opening up gifts together no one will recycle this and it will get chucked. so what to do? And then it came to me...cloth bags. I have been making these cute cloth bags. I will not try to use them for extended family since I have already burdened them with buying my children natural material-ed (I love making up my own words) toys, but next year I may try. My immediate family will open gifts that are enclosed in cute Christmas-y cloth bags. We can use these year after year and just add to them. I am so excited. I want to runt o the store and buy up cute fabric, but I'm cheap and awaiting sales.


Practical Thing #1

I'm using up gift cards to buy presents. Usually I am selfish with these and spend them for extra fun items, but this year I've been using them to purchase gifts. I bought just under 200.00 worth of gifts using gift cards at no cost to myself. Awesome.


Practical Thing #2

I've emptied my credit cards reward points. I purchased for myself with no money of my own a Sony 4GB MP3 player, a $25 itunes gift card and a $25 blockbuster gift card. Sounds good to me! Woo hoo!