Greening Easter Baskets: Rethinking Plastic and Junk Food Treats

            What would Easter be like without plastic Easter eggs to step on and the curling pastel globs of plastic grass making its way into every forgotten place in the house? We’re going to find out. We’re rethinking, in small ways, of how to start our own traditions that don’t revolve around the use of petroleum—in the candy or to hold the candy.

Making baskets by recycling other containers

            This is something that could change every few years, or however often we’d need to make a new or replace an old basket. This year, we just bought the kids shoes and the almost square boxes suggested themselves to be the stuff of the first recycled Easter baskets in our home.

            Using white paper, I drew Easter eggs which the kids colored, and then attached the paper around the four sides of the box to transform it from a shoe house to a holiday-themed basket. This is not rocket-science—this is simple. Maybe as the kids are older, we would get more elaborate—say, weaving actual wrapped coil baskets out of all those plastic bags that foods come in… But with kids under the age of 5, this is a good start.

Plastic Grass Substitute

            My mantra in this is to not buy anything new, and the solution for a plastic-grass substitute is actually what inspired the whole idea: I have tons of pastel-colored tissue paper left over from baby showers! I have saved it for years, and yet, I’ve not attended enough baby showers to use up all that I was given at my own. Strips of polka-dotted, gingham and solid pastels worked quite well to provide a bedding in the basket to hold the treats.

            I thought it’d take a lot of tissue paper to create the volume I wanted to fill the boxes, so I brought out 10-15 sheets from my stash. I folded one yellow sheet as many times as my scissors could cut through, and I found, surprisingly, that cutting only one mostly filled the box.