Since my post on plastic-free Thanksgiving tips was so popular, I decided to write one on Christmas dinner too. Here are some tips I came up with for making a plastic-free Christmas dinner. A lot of these tips are the same as the ones for the Thanksgiving post. Thought I should say that now so you aren’t disappointed.
1. Use reusable shopping bags when you buy your ingredients. Use reusable produce bags too. You can buy these online (Etsy is a good source) or make them yourself.
2. Instead of buying pre-made pastry shells packaged in plastic for your pies, make your own pastry using plastic-free ingredients. Use parchment paper to chill it instead of plastic wrap. I have a recipe that calls for lard and a recipe that uses butter instead of lard.
3. I’m Canadian. I always eat tourtière (French-Canadian meat pie) at Christmas. This is the recipe I use. Bring a reusable container to buy the meat.
4. If you don’t eat meat, nutloaf is a good vegetarian option for Christmas dinner. I haven’t tried it, but if you want a vegetarian toutière you could try using nutloaf instead of meat to fill the pastry. This is the recipe I use for nutloaf.
5. Instead of cranberry sauce (unless you find a source of plastic-free cranberries), try this recipe for pear raisin chutney. It can easily be made plastic-free and it tastes great. It tastes awesome with tourtière (even better than cranberry sauce in my opinion).
6. Try one of my plastic-free pie recipes for dessert. If you make pumpkin pie, cook a whole pumpkin instead of buying canned pumpkin. I have recipes for rhubarb pie, pumpkin pie and walnut tart.
7. If you’re making stuffing, make the bread for it yourself. Try throwing some chopped fresh herbs into the bread dough. I did this for Thanksgiving and it was really good.
8. Plastic-free Christmas cookies! I don’t have a lot of cookie recipes on here, but I do have one for sugar cookies. I didn’t put icing on them, but if you can find powdered sugar in bulk you can easily make plastic-free icing. You can also find food coloring in glass bottles at natural food stores if you want colored icing. I usually use silver dragées to decorate cookies but they’re banned in California. I buy them in Canada at Bulk Barn. I haven’t found plastic-free sprinkles (yet).
9. If you’re drinking on Christmas, try to find wines without plastic corks. Corkwatch is a database you can search to find wines with natural corks.
10. Store Christmas dinner leftovers in glass containers. Check out this list of things to use instead of plastic wrap for storing your leftovers.
I hope these tips help. Merry Christmas!
The Plastic-Free Chef 
bought the Abeego wraps yesterday per your suggestion on your ‘plastic free cheese’ post a while back – yay 🙂
just an FYI though, a lot of cities’ laws prohibit you bringing your own container to meat and deli counters – here in Portland, where you’d think our green rep would make this possible, it’s actually not. you can only bring your own container for bulk bins, not for anything that someone else serves you from behind a counter. sucks! 😦
Yeah I think you mentioned that before. That stinks! 😦 That’s cool that you got the Abeego flats though. 🙂
I actually called the local health department here in Connecticut, and they told me that the deli counter cannot package your food in a package you bring from home. I asked if that was because of a concern that the container would contaminate the work-area. The official said that was it. So, I asked if the clerk could hand me the product in paper, and I could put it in the container myself. They affirmed that would be alright. I’m vegetarian, so I don’t buy meat. I don’t see this working well for meat.
ha, yeah I can’t imagine the guy handing me over a piece of raw chicken breast over the counter!