The year-end holiday season brings with it decisions decisions decisions on what to do, buy, and give. 

Stressed about doing the right thing? Try these “why didn't I think of this earlier" ideas.

1. Green Greeting Cards

Here in the US alone, the 1.6 billion holiday cards we send every year is enough to circle the earth 7 times. That's a lot of trees!

Christopher Wu founded Paper Culture to give us better options. This Los-Altos, CA company makes all their cards from 100% recycled paper, offsets their entire carbon footprint, and plants a tree for every order!

Botanical PaperWorks doesn't plant trees – they let you do it instead!

Heidi Reimer Epp founded her company in Winnipeg, MB, which prints cards on recycled paper embedded with seeds. Send someone you love a card and they get to see it grow into wildflowers, herbs or vegetables.

2. Christmas Trees: Real, Fake, or Other?

There's little doubt fake trees are bad for the environment, so real trees are always better than fake trees. If that still leaves you uncomfortable about cutting down trees, there's another option – rental trees!

If you live in the South San Francisco Bay Area, Santa Cruz, Monterey Peninsula, and Salinas regions, Rent A Living Christmas Tree will deliver a potted Christmas tree to you for the holiday season.

After the season, they'll pick it back up and return it to their forest nursery, where it continues to grow and absorb carbon for another year!

Catherine Loveless & Jonathan Mearns were walking the streets of London one January day, crowded with Christmas trees headed for the landfill. That's when they decided to start London Christmas Tree Rental.

With 4 locations around London, rent your tree for the holidays and you can even tag it to rent the same one next year!

3. Share An Experience

Who wants more stuff? Not 3 out of 4 people who value experiences over things because it makes them happier. So share your time, a lunch date, a staycation, a weekend getaway, or if you can go bigger, how about these?

Liliana Palma Santos founded her Indigenous Woman-owned Zapotec Travel Experiences by Lily sustainable travel company in Oaxaca, Mexico, offering “unique, intimate, off-the-beaten-path experiences".

Lily created these experiences only with small indigenous-owned businesses and families, so that she can preserve and honor the traditions of her Zapotec culture.

By letting business owners keep 100% of what they sell (unlike most other travel companies who take up to half), Lily chooses to help them grow their businesses and create more jobs for the local community!

Justin Francis founded Responsible Travel  in Brighton, England almost as an anti-tourism travel company! Things he won’t do: orphanage tourism, elephant rides, orca shows.

What he will do: “travel that maximises benefits to local communities and preserves nature – which helps bring you closer to both". Every single program they offer spells out why and how.

Even more amazing: your trip supports their Trip for a Trip program, providing “a day trip for a child from a disadvantaged background to see something they’ve never seen before – like the sea, a wild animal close to home, or museum of their history". They’ve made a difference in over 5,000 kids so far throughout the UK, Romania, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, India, Nepal,, Thailand, Rio and more!

Know more businesses like these? Suggest them to us here!