Re-purposing Christmas Decorations

If your family is anything like mine, you have at least 30-40 Christmas decorations you haven’t used in a decade. Granted, some are too tattered to use and too precious to throw away, but the majority are still in good shape.

As you begin the annual chore of putting Christmas away, sort through these decorations and prepare them for donating. Many of your local non-profit organizations need the festive decorations for their holiday fundraisers. Call or email them and ask if they can use any. There are also organizations that assist those who need to rebuild their lives from the ground up, such as women’s shelters, fire victims, children’s homes, and halfway houses.

The need is there, so be generous and honest with yourself! Do you really need those boxes of ornaments you don’t use anymore? Sorting needs to occur, so start. Take what is in near perfect condition and place it in one pile, the pieces that are good but need cleaning in another pile, and the pieces that need real work or need to be thrown away in yet another pile.

Tinsel, even short pieces, is generally in great to good condition and can be reused in any number of ways. Tabletop trees, small arrangements around or in a pretty plate or vase can all use small pieces of tinsel.

Garland, the fake greenery, is the same as tinsel. It is generally in good shape and can be used in just about any length you have. Dust both well, looking for stains or large defects. Donating trash is, well, trashy.

Ornaments can often be redecorated and given a new life for you, as gifts to friends or donated.

If you have those satin covered balls, but they are getting a bit frizzy, don’t toss them out. Give them a haircut and add a design in sequins and beads. You can find many ideas for designs in craft catalogs or websites.

You can see how frizzy this one has gotten. The finished product is the top picture.

If you have glass ornaments whose shine is less than mirror-like, you can redecorate these as well. Paint, glitter, or decoupage can all work wonders on an ornament that has lost its luster. There are a few ideas on this website

The first ornament was painted in 2 days - allowing for paint to dry and drawing

on of design. My first attempt at painting!

This ornament was decoupaged from a Christmas card of 2007. A base layer of white and then the art from the card was put on top, with about 4 layers of glue on that and some glitter just because.

There can even be new life for your Christmas cards. The picture portion can be the nametag for the presents under your tree. They can also be used in several different ways to make Christmas ornaments. You can cut portions of the pictures and place them on Styrofoam or satin balls, filling in with sequins, beads, ribbon and lace. You can decoupage the pictures onto Styrofoam or glass balls. You can glue the pictures onto Styrofoam balls and then dip them in wax to give an antique and fragile feel to them.

You can also cut them and use paper folding techniques to make them into ornaments of their own right. Here is one such style (the upper left ornament was done with the directions at the link). The rest were taken from a paper folding book I have.

If you’d rather, you can decoupage them onto boxes and give them as gifts or to hold special ornaments for use next year. You can also do all of these things with wrapping paper sections that aren’t folded or have tape on them, but are too small to use again next year.

As you see, there are many ways to use, reuse, recycle just about all of the trappings of Christmas that are either thrown away, or stowed away for years until you can’t remember why you had them in the first place.

Plus, all of the craft ideas here are great for kids to do on boring weekends, giving them a great creative outlet that is so needed during winter months.

R or R VHS and Laser Disks

Good for you for being concerned about your gargantuan film collection's trashy implications. But I don't think you need to choose between your passion for film and your nascent enviro consciousness. Firstly, I've found a place to degauss and recycle your discards. Secondly, where's the incentive to be an environmentalist if you have to jettison your movies? You need not eradicate fun, though owning Tons of Stuff violates the first precept of the trite-but-true eco-trinity: Reduce-Reuse-Recycle.
Must you swim in Gaia guilt? No. Laser discs and VHS tapes are small consumer items and, generally, smaller items have a smaller environmental impact -- fewer raw materials, lighter to ship, and, in this instance, no evil leaching poisons.
As you mentioned, the second precept -- Reuse -- will be fairly easy. I don't know a lot about the used VHS market, but I doubt you'll have much trouble off-loading to libraries, schools, yard sales, and friends.
When the reuse well runs dry -- if no one wants that battered copy of Klute -- it's on to Recycle. With your generous supply of identical materials, it'll be one-stop shopping for a recycler. Et, voila!: Send unwanted laser discs and VHS tapes to GreenDisk. GreenDisk is a large company involved in commercial electronic media reuse and recycling; they are also willing to absorb your personal laser discs and VHS tapes into their waste-reprocessing stream. Your tapes will be degaussed and resold to cities and police departments for surveillance tapes; your discs will be shredded and sold for plastics reuse.
But what is this degaussing? It's a fancy word for sticking videotape under a giant magnet. The modern process of electronic media erasure takes its name from Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, a brilliant 19th-century mathematician who calculated the orbits of asteroids, fathered the mathematical theory of electricity, and developed a measurement for magnetic induction. History has bestowed his name on the centimeter-gram-second unit of magnetic flux density, the gauss. Anyhoo, privacy protection is a large concern in the electronic media recycling field, and degaussing assures the erasure of delicate or personal materials through scrambling of the magnetic registers on audio- and videotape. GreenDisk guarantees degaussing, so any wretched home movies you've made are safe to send along with Krzysztof Kieslowski's masterworks.

Also :
Freecycle has been good place to give things a new home...

craigslist > your-city > free stuff

For the past two years we have been giving away the degaussed tapes toemployees, film students, interns, schools, and basically anyone who wantsthem. We do all we can to avoid dumping them in landfills.
Ronald Briggs
New Line Cinema

A Place To Donate:
http://www.actrecycling.org/donations/default.asp