With the holidays come gifts, and with gifts come wrapping paper, ribbons, bows, boxes and bags. You name it, we use it. Fact: the holidays are the most wasteful time of year, according to the Use Less Stuff Report. But perhaps we can indulge without overdoing it. After all, who actually enjoys cramming that bag full of crumpled, used wrapping supplies into the already post-holiday packed dumpster? Consider the following:

It takes an average of four months for a credit card user to pay off holiday bills.

Between Thanksgiving and the New Year, Americans generate an extra million tons of waste each week.

About 38,000 miles of ribbon are thrown away each year—enough to tie a bow around Earth.

The 2.65 billion Christmas cards sold in the United States each year could fill a football field 10 stories high.

At least 28 billion pounds of edible food is wasted each year—over 100 lbs. per person.

About 33 million live Christmas trees are sold in North America every year.

Here are some simple things we can do to reduce our waste this holiday season:

If every family in the United States reused two feet of ribbon this holiday season, 19,000 miles would be saved.
SO: Who needs ribbon anyway? If you don’t have old ribbon to reuse, don’t waste your money on any. Your gifts can look just as lovely sans the knots which usually frustrate us into using scissors (or our teeth) anyway.

Reusing paper on only three of the 20 gifts the average consumer wraps each year would save enough paper to cover 45,000 football fields.
SO: Wrap gifts with newspaper, comics, cloth or any other material you can find. It’ll save you money on wrapping supplies and you can recycle it when you’re done. If you receive wrapped gifts, reuse the paper and the ribbon.

If every family reduced holiday gas consumption by one gallon—about 20 miles—we’d reduce greenhouse gas emissions by one million tons.
SO: Walk, ride or Muni it wherever you can to reduce both pollution and those extra pounds packed on to your holiday waistline.

If we each sent one less card, we’d save 50,000 cubic yards of paper.
SO: Instead of sending cards to be promptly tossed post-holiday, e-mail your season’s greetings to friends and family. Nearly everyone has the Web at their fingertips, and it saves money and time in those hellish holiday post office lines.

For more information on holiday waste and what you can do to reduce it, visit www.use-less-stuff.com or www.simplifytheholidays.org.

All facts courtesy of The Center for a New American Dream, the Use Less Stuff Report and the California Integrated Waste Management Board.