Christmas Dinner as Christmas Décor! Precycling your Holiday Meal

“If a bookmark costs a dollar, why not just use a dollar for a bookmark?”
- Sam Laur, boy genius who gets his good looks from Dad, age 7.

We all know what recycling is, unless you’ve been living under a rock since about 1967. But have you heard of precycling? Precycling is when you use some material, product or item for some useful purpose before you use it for the reason it was originally intended, saving or avoiding the use of some other material or product as a result.

Melissa’s Christmas dinner décor is a perfect example of this. She’s cleverly using the very things she’s later going to serve her guests - bottles of wine, fruits, even rhubarb and Brussels sprouts as cheerful holiday décor to create a festive atmosphere, instead of spending her hard earned cash on plastic schlock from XYZ Mart. These natural items create welcoming warmth that artifice cannot approach.

And best of all, Melissa is using these fruits of the earth at least three times. First, precycled as holiday décor, second as a sumptuous meal to nourish and nurture her guests, body and soul. And thirdly the leftover bits can be recycled and composted into rich humus for her spring garden. We can enjoy oranges as a bright slash of color and scent in a fruit bowl, once again as a sweet treat in a holiday salad, and then again as an outdoor hanging treat for orioles. Nuts can add warm brown tones to the table, a delicious treat over coffee and conversation, and then the shells can be mulched onto our gardens, or crushed to fill a stuffed toy or ball.

So whether it’s a large wrapped boxed gift that can serve as a temporary table for the rest of the Christmas loot, a bowl of colored kale that serves as a centerpiece before it’s steamed with some roasted chestnuts, or a living evergreen that graces your yard 11 months of the year and your living room in December, unwrap your imagination this holiday season when it comes to precycling, enjoying and recycling your festive treats.  What ideas do you have? Share them with us in the comments section below, while you take another log from your decorative display on your porch and lay it on the cheery firs blazing in the woodstove. Happy Precycling this holiday season!

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