A Sustainable Festive Season: Simple Shifts with Big Meaning

The festive season brings joy, connection, and often a great deal of waste. For early childhood services, it can also bring pressure: pressure to create impressive displays, provide gifts for families, and coordinate concerts or celebrations that meet everyone's expectations.

But what if, instead of adding more, we focused on what these celebrations already communicate? What values do our festive traditions reveal, and do they align with the sustainability principles we're working to embed throughout the year?

Sustainable celebrations aren't about cancelling Christmas or removing joy. They're about bringing the same care and intention to festive practices that we bring to the rest of our program.

1. From Activities to Values

Traditional festive activities often involve single-use materials, disposable decorations, and production-focused outcomes. Glitter-covered crafts go home in plastic bags. Concerts require new costumes. Gift exchanges generate packaging waste.

None of this is inherently wrong, but it's worth asking: What are we teaching children through these practices?

Sustainability rests on three interconnected values: care, connection, and responsibility. Care means noticing needs and responding thoughtfully, whether that's caring for materials, environments, plants and animals, or one another. Connection recognises that we're interdependent—our choices affect others, places, and futures. Responsibility acknowledges that we have agency in shaping outcomes through our decisions and actions.

When celebrations reflect these values, children experience sustainability as something real and lived, not abstract or distant. They see that care shapes how we use resources, that connection informs how we celebrate together, and that responsibility guides the choices we make.

This doesn't require abandoning tradition. It means looking at what you already do and asking how it might be done differently.

2. Five Areas to Consider

1. Celebrating Creativity

Children love making things. The question is whether those things need to be new, decorated with purchased materials, and sent home to be stored or discarded.

Consider what happens when creativity focuses on transformation rather than production. Instead of making ornaments from new craft supplies, children might transform cardboard into decorations, fabric scraps into bunting, or collected natural materials into gifts.

The process remains joyful, but the message shifts. We're not just making things—we're showing that beautiful outcomes can come from reusing, reimagining, and creating with care.

Reflective question: How might your end-of-year displays communicate your sustainability values to families?

2. Sharing and Gifting

Gift exchanges are common in early childhood settings, but they often generate significant waste. Plastic toys, disposable wrapping, and items chosen for convenience rather than meaning.

Sustainable gifting focuses on gestures that model care, reciprocity, and fairness. This might mean:

• Children creating something meaningful rather than purchasing gifts

• Services giving families something reusable, such as a fabric bag with recipes or a plant cutting from the garden

• Replacing physical gifts with shared experiences or contributions to community projects

When gifting emphasises relationship rather than objects, children learn that care can be expressed in many ways.

Reflective question: What values do your gifting traditions communicate to children and families?

3. Festive Food

Shared meals are central to many festive traditions. They're also rich opportunities for sustainability learning.

Cooking with children invites conversations about where food comes from, what grows locally, and how we reduce waste. Preparing a meal together teaches collaboration, care, and gratitude in ways that lectures about food waste never could.

Consider:

• Involving children in planning menus that use seasonal, local ingredients

• Composting food scraps and discussing what happens to waste

• Creating rituals around gratitude for the food, the people who grew it, and the land it came from

• Inviting families to share food traditions from their own cultures, recognising that not all families celebrate Christmas and that festive seasons look different across communities

• Using shared meals as opportunities to learn about diverse celebration practices and the values they express

Festive food doesn't need to be elaborate. It needs to be prepared with intention and shared with care.

Reflective question: How can your festive food traditions highlight care for people and the environment while honouring diverse cultures and celebrations?

4. Children's Creativity and Perspective

Celebrations often follow adult plans: we decide the theme, choose the activities, and determine how the event will unfold. But what if children expressed their own understanding of celebration?

The Reggio Emilia concept of the 100 Languages of Children offers a different approach. Instead of adults planning everything, children might communicate what celebration means to them through drawing, making cards, writing and illustrating letters to families, or creating with clay.

When given authentic ways to express themselves, children reveal perspectives that go far beyond adult expectations. They might write plays about what celebrations mean to them, represent festival traditions from their families through art, or compose their own songs or poems.

This approach also honours cultural diversity. One child might draw their family's Diwali celebration, another might write about Hanukkah, another about Eid, Christmas, or the summer solstice. Their creativity becomes the celebration itself, not just decoration for an adult-planned event.

The shift is simple but significant. Instead of asking "What craft will we make for families?" we might ask "How would you like to show your family what this year has meant to you?"

When children's thinking, skills, and creativity take centre stage, the celebration becomes genuinely theirs. The work reflects their learning, their relationships, and their growing understanding of what it means to care for and connect with others.

Reflective question: How might your celebrations change if children led the creative process and chose how to express their learning and ideas?

5. Reflection and Gratitude

Many services end the year with portfolios, displays, or presentations that showcase children's work. These moments can either focus on production—how much was made, how impressive it looks—or on growth, learning, and connection.

Reflection invites children to consider what they learned, how they've grown, and what mattered most this year. Gratitude shifts focus from individual achievement to collective care and community.

Instead of (or alongside) displaying artwork, consider:

• Creating a gratitude tree where children and families add notes about moments that mattered

• Documenting children's reflections on what they're proud of or what surprised them this year

• Acknowledging care contributions, such as children who consistently helped others, looked after materials, or noticed when something needed attention

These practices celebrate growth in ways that align with sustainability values: recognising care, connection, and responsibility rather than just output.

Reflective question: How will your team carry this sense of gratitude into the new year?

3. Starting Small

You don't need to change everything at once. Choose one area that feels manageable and consider how a small shift might better reflect your values.

Perhaps this year, instead of buying new wrapping paper, you'll involve children in creating reusable fabric wraps. Or instead of a gift exchange, you'll create a shared artwork that stays in the service as a reminder of the year.

These changes don't need to be visible to everyone. What matters is that they reflect intention and care, and that children are part of the thinking behind them.

4. Bringing Your Values to Life

Sustainable celebrations aren't about doing less. They're about doing what you already do with more intention, ensuring that your festive practices align with the values you're embedding throughout the year.

If sustainability means care, connection, and responsibility, then every celebration—big or small—can reflect those principles.

Reflective questions:

• Which festive practices already reflect your sustainability values?

• Where might small shifts create better alignment between your values and your actions?

• How could children be involved in planning celebrations that reflect care for people and the environment?

Take Action: For detailed guidance on embedding sustainability in festive celebrations, explore the 2025 Sustainability Snapshot, which includes practical examples and reflection prompts for educators.

👉Access the 2025 Sustainability Snapshot here.

Continue the conversation - check out Part 3 of our podcast conversation series Reflect Reconnect and Reimagine here 👉 A Sustainable Festive Season: Simple Shifts with Big Meaning