Christmas Leftovers – Make Good Use of Them

Here are four main things that you usually end up with after your Christmas celebration – turkey, tree, cards and jumpers – and have problems with putting  them to good use without being accused of being wasteful and an enemy of the environment!

Christmas Tree

Real Christmas Trees are more eco-friendly as the fake ones produce more Co2 due to its manufacturing, transportation and not to mention disposal. And if you did use a real Christmas tree, continue your effort at being environmentally friendly by disposing of it in the following ways:

• Leave it in its stand and place it in a bare spot in your garden where enjoy it for the rest of the winter and also more importantly will provide winter shelter for the birds;
• If there is no stand, lay it on its side to provide shelter for the rabbits;
• Chop off the evergreen branches and use them to protect your perennials during the winter;
• Use the thin branches to provide a base for your compost pile – stack them four to six inches high. The mulch can be used as fertilizers in the spring;
• Some councils accept Christmas Trees for composting –check if yours does.

Turkey

Any leftovers should be consumed within two days and if you think you have ordered a turkey way above your need, then you should put whatever you cannot consume within two days in the freezer. Debone and chop them into small pieces, wrap them properly and put into a sealed container, ready for use later.

To use your leftovers within the two days;

• Stock - the carcass can be slow boiled to make a stock to be used to cook rice, making a perfectly flavoured rice or used in a casserole, soup or soup noodles.
• The debone meat can be cut into small pieces and used:
  • in fried rice and noodle dishes - spicy interesting Asian dishes;
  • turkey apple sandwiches – mix the meat with chopped apple and walnuts, season with pepper and salt and a squeeze of lemon.

Christmas Cards

Christmas cards come with defined motifs and shapes, making it easy to recycle them for other uses:

• Gift tags – cut out the pictures – Santa, reindeer, Christmas pudding etc, either making the actual image into the tag or a typical luggage tag; punch a hole at the top and insert a ribbon through or attaché the tag by tape to your gift.
• Garland – either punch out the shapes from your card, regular shapes or follow the pictures and string them to make a garland. This can be used as your Christmas deco for the following year.
• Motifs for your gift bags – cut out the images and stick them to your gift bags.

Jumpers

Come Christmas and we all head to the stores to get jumpers for the whole family to get ourselves into the festive mood. At best, we use these jumpers twice as we outgrow them in size or fashion. What a waste!

Turn them into the following:

Hats, gloves, scarves, throws or even dog jumper! Your pet will be eternally grateful to you in these cold winter months.