Tips for a more responsible Christmas

Christmas gifts and Christmas cards

• Ask the gift recipient what he or she wants for Christmas – buy only what is necessary. When making gift purchases, favour accountability, and make discoveries at recycling centres and flea markets.
• Wrap your gifts in imaginative ways and use existing materials such as magazine pages or beautiful fabrics.
• Save the Christmas gift wrappings, bags and strings – they will work well the next Christmas. (Please remember that gift wrapping paper does not belong to recycled paper collection but to energy/mixed waste.)
• Buy, give and wish for intangible gifts, such as experiences, services, time and high spirits. You can find great gift ideas on the Buy, give and wish for intangible gifts, such as experiences, services, time and high spirits. You can find great gift ideas on the Annajotainmuuta website.
• Cut out and save the picture pages of folded Christmas cards and use them for Christmas and package cards the next Christmas

At the Christmas table

• Plan your meals with love, but in moderation. If you serve a variety of dishes, the quantities may then be smaller.
• Favour domestic Christmas dishes, enjoy vegetarian dishes and feast on meat dishes in moderate amounts.
• Enjoy your Christmas delicacies using non-disposable tableware.
• The leftover Christmas food is ideal for making many new, tasty dishes – this also helps you reduce food waste
• The waste ham cooking fat is future diesel fuel. Therefore, save the waste cooking fat of ham and other Christmas dishes and take it to a Kinkkutemppu (Ham Trick) collection point. (Please remember that the waste cooking fat must not be poured into the drain.)

Saving electricity

• In your Christmas lighting, favour LED lights, use plug-in Christmas lights instead of battery powered lights
• Do not wait too long before going to Christmas sauna, but take the sauna as soon as it has warmed up.

Give old Christmas balls a new stylish look with natural materials

• It is easy to give plastic Christmas tree balls a fresh look with leftover yarn and various strings.
• You might find cheap Christmas tree balls in your own storage, flea markets, recycling centres and the Kontti second-hard stores of Finnish Red Cross.
• In addition to balls, strings and yarn, all you need is glue and scissors.

Give your Christmas home a new, modern look with the help of Strömsö’s handy guide: https://yle.fi/aihe/a/20-10005866

Disposing of a Christmas Tree

The general instruction is to take the tree, intact, outside to the waste collection point and leave it standing upright so it won’t get buried in snow. Do not chop it up or put it in a waste bin. Remember to remove all decorations.

In the HSY area, HSY collects Christmas trees separately in January–February. Most of them are taken to the Ämmässuo eco-industrial center in Espoo to be chipped. Trees collected in February are sent to the waste-to-energy plant. You can also take your tree to a Sortti station. Separate collection improves the quality of the wood chips.

A tree can also be reused as a kututoro, which helps support biodiversity. A kututoro means sinking the tree into shallow shore water, providing an excellent spawning site for fish—for example, by a cabin shoreline.

Some horse stables are also happy to receive Christmas trees as food for horses. Horses enjoy nibbling on spruce trees, which reduces their need to chew on other wooden parts of the enclosure. Spruce is also known to have health-promoting effects. However, always ask the stable in advance whether they accept Christmas trees.

When carrying the tree through a stairwell, put it in a garbage bag or wrap it in a sheet to keep the stairwell clean.