Greening your Christmas  is one good way to continue to green up the world. Try these tips:

Buy yourself a live holiday tree from a nursery. Keep the tree outside on your porch, decorate it, until right before Christmas! It will survive happily for a week till the season is over. Then you can transplant it in your garden.

Make a hole for it that is deeper and larger than the tree’s own root ball, and it should have well-rotted compost of soil mixed with horse or cow manure.

You could even have an artificial tree which will last for ever. You won’t have to water it, or give it soil, nor will you have to chop it down.

Recycle your tree after Christmas: If you do buy a cut tree, try to recycle it when the holidays are over. Put the tree in your garden, dry it out, trim off the branches and use them, as mulch under acid-loving bushes and shrubs.

Try a nontoxic control of ants: sprinkle barriers of talcum powder, chalk, bone meal, or boric acid across their trails.

To control cockroaches; plug or caulk small cracks along wall shelves, cupboards and around pipes, sinks and kitchen corners. Lightly dust borax around the fridge, stove, and toilets. Make a trap: lightly grease the inner neck of a bottle and put a little stale beer or a raw potato inside. Try combining sugar, flour, and boric acid into a powder that cockroaches will take back to their nests as green Christmas gifts and poison other insects with.

Try gifting green presents instead of over-packaged, plastic gifts. Try these:

Give an experience (a gift of tickets to a play or a movie).

A recording or compact disc.

A subscription to a green or an organic gardening magazine or buy a nice book from a second hand book store.

Membership to a museum or a library.

Membership to your favourite nonprofit organization

Pay for a free lunch (costing Rs. 600) for all the gardeners who work so hard at the nursery of the Association for People with Disability (APD) ph: 25288672.

Take hampers of food, clothes or books for your favourite charity. Try the Satya Seva school where the girls from 8 slum areas would be happy to get clothes, books, toys, games, milk, food, or anything you can gift to them. Ph: 25478525.

Buy or plant a gorgeous houseplant – a philodendron, an ivy, a chrysanthemum, a money plant or a Synghonium – all of them help to purify indoor air. You can even make them from cuttings as free gifts.

Gift a solar water system or a solar heater or any other solar equipment.

Make or buy cloth dish towels, warm blankets or pillows for the needy.

A gorgeous tree costing Rs. 50 or even less at the APD nursery. The honge tree only costs Rs. 15.
Plant a sapling:  contact Janet S K Yegneswaran, president, Rajanet Yegneswaran Charitable Trust. Phone : 9845449703 or visit www.treesforfree.org.

Gift a ticket for a day trip to Mysore etc. and back.

Stop using disposable diapers for babies this Christmas: it takes twenty trees to keep one baby in disposable diapers for two years. What a waste!