Christmas Gift Catalogs: Recycle Clutter into Creativity

As soon as the trick-or-treaters step off the front porch each year, my mailman arrives with an armload of Christmas gift catalogs. And it seems that he keeps bringing me increasingly taller stacks of those Christmas gift catalogs each and every day of the holiday season until, finally, the New Year comes and the blitz ceases.

I wish I were the kind of person who could just take those Christmas gift catalogs from the mailman and dump them directly into the recycling bin. But I can’t. I am compelled to sort through them and save them to look at later. Well, I don't save the ones for cigar aficionados and duck hunters.

With all those Christmas gift catalogs lying around, it doesn’t take long before my dining table resembles the one in “Sanford and Son.” But this year, I am making an early New Year’s resolution to not let the clutter that is Christmas gift catalogs take over my home.

I am going to think of some new uses for those catalogs, if not to get them off my table then to honor all the trees that had to die to make them. Are you with me? Great, because these five ideas are all I have been able to come up with:

#5 — Whip out the old paper shredder and sacrifice those Christmas gift catalogs to its ferocious teeth. Use the shredded pages of the Christmas gift catalogs to pack fragile gifts that need to be mailed to friends and family during the holidays. Since I don’t have a paper shredder, I guess I will just crumple the pages of the Christmas gift catalogs, but I bet it won’t give me the kind of stress-reducing pleasure that sending them through a shredder would. Those lucky paper shredder owners have all the fun.