B2W Group's Alternative Christmas P2 + P3

Christmas is one of the biggest traditional holidays around the world. With around 2 billion people celebrating every year and every clothes shop numbing our brains with Christmas songs for 3 months prior to the Christmas Season. However, despite the firmly planted traditions, how we celebrate the holiday has changed throughout the decades and e could be due a new way to satisfy our festive spirits. Part 2 & 3 are around recycling gifts and forgotten traditions!

Recycled Christmas.

It is estimated that the amount of money spent on Christmas decorations in the US each year would be enough to eliminate their homelessness entirely. With this in mind, maybe it is about time to stop buying new decorations. The cost of living here in the UK is also sky rocketing, making things like fairy lights and fibreoptic trees a no-go for some. So, what could we do as an alternative to being the one house on the estate lit up like Blackpool Tower?

Recycled gift-wrapping paper is easy enough to source these days but there are also some budget friendly options available. Circling back to Christmas traditions, you could start a new one. Leave the Sellotape in the kitchen drawer this year and start using ribbons to close the wrapping. Get a few family members involved and make sure everyone is onboard with the idea and simply don’t rip the wrapping paper. It may seem a little OTT but in doing this you could start a new tradition of exchanging the means to wrap gifts as well as the gifts themselves. This could also effectively remove the need for buying one-use wrapping paper each year.
Stockings and bags can also produce the same result and are more robust by design. This could also work to conceal any surprise gifts without the need to wrap them and again can be reused each year.

Looking back to our Victorian ancestors who “introduced” (borrowed from Germany) a lot of our better-known traditions, we can see that they used candles to decorate their trees. We advise against putting candles on a highly flammable tree, but you can still safely place them around the house. Also, a useful biproduct in today’s economic climate will be the heat they produce which isn’t massive but there’s a noticeable difference. If you want to add an extra layer of festivity, simply keep any empty jars you’d normally throw away, get some tissue paper and PVA glue. Pick some festive colours and place a layer of tissue paper on the outside of your jar. Then all you need is to place a tealight in the jar and you have your very own DIY Fairy Lantern. You could even add stencils in your designs to make them extra Christmassy. It’s a fun easy craft project for the whole family and even better. it could help you save some cash.

Any repeat reader may have noticed a foraging trend throughout our blogs. That’s because B2W hired a womble to write blogs and they won’t stop going on about it, so this next section will be around decorations you can collect around Wimbledon common.

At the time of writing – undecorated pinecones come in at £8.89 Per Kilogram on Amazon. Quite a hefty price tag for something you can find all over the floor. You can literally find these for free, all over the floor. Once you have collected some of these floor pinecones, the next step is to dry them out. This means leaving them in the oven for about 30 minutes at 200 C – more detailed instructions can be found with a quick google search. Then you are left with some nice dry pinecones, ready for decorating. Imagination is really the limit with what you can make here. If you want something to hang from a tree these could be a nice stand in for baubles, add some beads and some festive colours and they’ll not even look out of place.

Sticking with a theme here, conkers are at £10 a Kilogram on eBay so it’s probably more cost effective to pick up conkers vs pinecones. They are still free to find but probably less available than the aforementioned pinecones. However, these little horse chestnuts can be more pleasing to the eye with their shiny reddish-brown shells. They can be used to create a conker wreath without even needing to do any intricate designs, and it actually looks good! If you want to paint them then they could also make interesting little baubles, with a few glued together to make a cluster. It’s also worth mentioning, although not proven, some people swear by the horse chestnut’s natural ability to repel spiders and moths. So this could be a perfect alternative for any arachnophobes out there.

Forgotten Christmas Traditions.

The Christmas we celebrate today has evolved a lot over the years. The main change we all feel is that the holiday has largely changed from a religious community celebration, to a commercial holiday. Over time these cultural and quality of life changes have paralleled changes to the traditions surrounding Christmas itself. Some have maintained their prominence since their first introduction, such as Christmas trees. Others have changed slightly, such as carolling. Then a large amount have been left in the past due to changes in lifestyle and in some cases just sheer impracticality. In this final Alternate Christmas piece, we will be looking over a number of Christmas’s forgotten traditions.

Lord Of Misrule.

Meat Shows.

This forgotten tradition may start to make a comeback with the rise in popularity of farmers markets. There isn’t a lot to say that isn’t obvious from the title of the tradition – Essentially the local butchers would be allotted a day on the run up to Christmas where they would gather together and sell their meats. Although mostly a way to shift a back stock, there were also competitive sides to the Meat Shows with awards like “best fat sheep”.

Princeps.

Dating back to Ancient Roman times, there was a festival called Saturnalia which ran from the 17^th to the 23^rd of December. During this time someone of low status – usually a child, was selected to be in charge of the family celebrations throughout the festival. This could be another tradition that could make a comeback with Christmas in mind, seeing as most of the Christmas festivities are set up for children as it is.

Goose Dancing.

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