I’ve had “make crackers” on my ideas list for a while and every time I saw it, I thought “mmm crackers” but it turns out I meant Christmas crackers. (Although I do make a good eatin’ cracker as well – I’d highly recommend these honey glazed fennel seed ones, and am perfecting the ingredient levels on my own varieties too.)

So… Christmas crackers. In one of the many, many newspaper articles about having a frugal Christmas during the New Austerity Age, I read that making Christmas crackers is a false economy – because it often costs more to make them at home than you can buy them for in the shops.

But money isn’t everything – homemade ones can be a lot lower waste – using up household rubbish and can contain actually useful (or delicious) prizes rather than bits of plastic tat.

There are many tutorials online for making basic crackers out of toilet rolls tubes and squares of Christmas wrapping paper (with purpose-bought crackers snaps for that bit of bang) but I wondered if anyone had any ideas for making them more interesting or creative.

Is it possible to make reusable Christmas crackers? The body refillable each year?

And does anyone make their own paper hats to go inside them?

(There is a strong “reduce” angle here obviously – both to save on money and waste, but for many people they’re an essential part of the Christmas tradition so best try to reduce as much as possible by reusing and recycling instead.)

(If you’re saying to yourself “what on earth is a Christmas cracker?”, just ignore this post – it’s a silly British thing.)

(There are a lot of asides in this post, aren’t there?)

We’ve had an email from Philip, asking about disposable hair nets:

I work in food production (ready meal factory) and have to wear a hair net whenever I’m on the floor. Some staff have proper hats but the rest of us have to have single use hair nets. Management say it’s cheaper but I think it’s very wasteful. Can they be recycled?

Whenever I get hold of one of them, I keep it to reuse at home – single use, schmingle use – when having a big baking or preserving session. (I’m less bothered about having a completely sterile environment and more about keeping my hair out of my face – and my food.) But if I was getting them every day, that wouldn’t really be an option – and they’re not the sort of thing you could pass on to others.

From what I’ve read, that type of hat is typically made out of polypropylene (older style nets are sometimes nylon) so the actually recycling options are very limited to non-existent. It seems like there many be a possibility of textile reclamation but all the information I can find out it is in the US so I’m not sure if there are any companies over here. As for reuses, they’re a bit like last week’s net curtains but not as strong so not suitable for all the ideas for them – and again, if you’re using them every day, they’re quickly going to mount up so no amount of crafts can solve the problem.

I think the key thing here really is to reduce: if it’s simply a matter of cost, you may want to consider buying your own hat so at least you’re not contributing to the problem – they’re not much and I suspect if you could get some other people involved you might be able to push the price down further by bulk buying (or at least sharing out delivery costs). However, from what I’ve read, there is sometimes an issue about not taking protective clothing outside of the sterile environment so it would be worth checking what arrangements (if any) are in place for handling the existing proper hats.

Anyone got any reuse ideas? Or any suggestions on how Philip can lobby his bosses into doing the right thing and getting reusable hats?

We’ve had an email from (not my) John:

What can be done with Smint boxes? Anything?

Smint packets are sealed plastic dispensers, which according to the Smint website can’t be opened and refilled to “assure the maximum hygiene for our product”. That makes them infinitely less easy to reuse as, say, Tic Tac boxes, which can be opened and refilled easily.

Does anyone know if there is a way to open & refill Smint boxes? If you can get into them, like Tic Tac boxes, they’d be useful for storing and dispensing all sorts of small items like beads, seeds or air rifle pellets. If you can’t get into them though, I’m stuck for reuses. Anyone else got any ideas?

The best thing would probably be to avoid them in the first place – the all important “reduce”. There are lots of mints available in paper packaging – a much lower footprint.

Any other thoughts?

Wondering how to make your festive season that bit greener by making recycled Christmas decorations?

There are lots of ways to make them reusing waste paper, scrap fabric, or random other things from around the home and garden – and they’re certainly not all just for kids.

Here are some of our favourites:

• Want to have a starry, starry night? Use twigs from the garden to make window or tree decorations. (Or if your garden is as cold & icy as ours, any other sticks will suffice – perhaps the project to use up your hoarded collection of “disposable” chopstics or lolly pop sticks?)
• If you fancy something a little shinier, make stars from old foil cake or pie tins instead.
• Or if you prefer your stars in a classy matte, how about making these Christmas fairy light shades from old brown/manila envelopes?
• Brown paper shopping bags – particularly ones with a Christmas themed print on them – can be made into decorative Christmas stockings.
• Or if you’d prefer to have fabric stockings to stuff full of treats, how about recycling a pair of old jeans for a modern look?
• Smaller scraps of old clothes or fabric can be upcycled into scrap fabric wreaths – these ones made from scraps of old felted wool clothes are just lovely.
• If you’re more of a paper person, this origami Christmas wreath could be made with coloured waste paper – envelopes from Christmas cards for example.

• Or if buttons are more your thing (mmm, buttons), you could make this fab wreath instead – if you loosely sewed the buttons onto the card, you could snip them off to reuse as buttons as you needed them for actual buttoning purposes!
• If all these are a bit too grown up for you – or you’d like a project to keep the kids busy while you’re assisting Santa, how about using wine corks to make reindeer tree decorations?
• Or if you’ve still got last year’s Christmas cards, they could use them to make a cute bunting banner.
• Finally, a couple of our favourite ideas for revamping existing decorations that are getting old or tired: I love the look of these fabric wrapped Christmas items (I’ve done a similar thing before with a single colour frogged yarn – very pleasant).
• Or, turn plain baubles into fun (angry!) characters with a little paint.

We’ve had an email from Sarah P:

Cleaning out my boys toy box before Christmas, found lots of pieces of wooden toys from when they were little, sorting blocks, building blocks that sort of thing. Tried to get them into original sets to give away but either too many pieces missing or just not knowing what goes with what. Nice colours and shapes, shame to bin them.

As for the “not knowing what goes with what” issue, enlist the help of your sons ;)

If the pieces are from well known, popular toys, it might be worth offering them on Freecycle/Freegle or even eBay as spares – someone might want to complete their half-lost set or, as in the case of free building stuff, expand their supply. (Searching “spares” in the young children Toy section on eBay returns a lot of Playmobile/Brio/ELC HappyLand stuff so that stuff would probably go more quickly than generic building blocks or cheap toys.)

I can understand the desire to declutter before Christmas but don’t underestimate the value of random bits & pieces for future imaginative play potential – I remember having random bits of pre-school toys around until I was at least 10, using them as assorted markers or objects, reinventing them in different ways to fit the purpose.

The toys will likely to have been painted or varnished so shouldn’t really be burnt or composted and I suspect to be safe for little ones, they’ll be quite chunky – possibly too big for upcycling into fun costume jewellery. They might make a mobile or a decorative door hanger for a nursery though.

Any other reuse suggestions?