Rubbish-free year - Week 46

We had Campbell Live here with us this week; some of you would have seen it last Thursday night. The programme-makers asked that we have a Christmas tree. So we found a young self-seeded one on Matthew's parents' property and borrowed our mate's Christmas decorations!

There we go, secret's out. It did look really good on telly, though. Even though we are finishing on January 31, because the show ended last week, it covered the "finish" a few weeks out.

Still, things are coming to an end rather quickly. It was great watching our whole year summarised in five minutes - if you're more of a visual person then I suggest you ditch reading this right now and check out the TV3 website.

Guess what everyone's getting for Christmas this year? (Family - skip this paragraph if you will.) If you took the time I'm sure you could guess. Everyone's getting either a gift hamper or baking - all products from Bin Inn. We've got cane baskets and we'll wrap everything in cellophane or little brown paper bags.

Cellophane is not plastic. It's the same stuff that jellybeans and jetplanes are made of - ground calf hooves. Therefore it breaks down. But you have to be careful because a lot of cellophane apparently now has plastic mixed with it.

We will fill our hampers with macadamia nuts, cashews, dried apricots, mangoes and cranberries, chocolate and lollies.

We also thought another nice rubbish-free gift we could produce was baking.

We'll use flour, cocoa, sugar and so on from Bin Inn and eggs from our very own chooks.

Last week I made an absolutely decadent chocolate cake with cream and chocolate filling - yes we can use cream, the plastic's recyclable. We had a really healthy year this year avoiding packaging and processed foods - but it didn't have to be that way.

Some lollies, chocolate, butter, cream and sugar are still on this list - so long as you know where to shop and/or how to deal with the packaging, you could get fat living rubbish free. I am sure that's a heartening thought for some.

Merry Christmas everyone. I know Christmas has different meanings to different people, but one thing we can all agree on is this: Christmas is not, definitely not, about rubbish. So peace be upon those who compost the leftovers and blessings to all who fold and recycle their Christmas wrapping paper.