Birthday Celebrations: Sustainable Traditions

It is my daughters third birthday this morning so I thought it the perfect time to share some of our birthday traditions. After five years of birthdays (my son is five), we have built some solid birthday traditions that are not only special and sweet to us but also sustainable.

Our first tradition is our birthday circle. I love the Steiner way of celebrating another year around the sun and the birthday circle is a gorgeous way to represent this circle. The birthday circle is a wooden circle of four parts with space for 12 candles. You can just simply use the circle for lighting the specific amount of candles for your child’s age or you can also add adorable wooden decorations. Most years I purchase a wooden number (their age) and a decoration that represents something about them (Example: Harry has a wizard as he was named after Harry Potter and Alaska has a mushroom as we call her our Reishi baby). We also use our circles at Easter and Christmas. It is such a beautiful sight to see the children wake up and see their beautiful circle waiting for them. It really adds a touch of magic and whimsy.

Our next traditional is our fabric wrapping 'paper.' I buy pretty unisex fabric by the metre for birthdays, Easter and Christmas and cut into different sized squares to 'wrap' my gifts. Basically you are just tying the gift up in the fabric which makes it super easy to wrap even awkwardly shaped presents and is so quick and easy to do. I believe this method is called Furoshiki and originated in Japan. I love that you can easily store your fabric and use them year after year. It is now our family tradition to wrap gifts like this and the children love it just as much as I.

Our last birthday tradition is to re-use our decorations year after year. This is surprisingly really easy to do. In the past we have bought cheap cardboard bunting and flags so after use, I take them down, fold them up and place them in our 'celebration' drawer, which is just a draw of items we use to celebrate such as birthday candles, decorations and other things. We don't use balloons are they are disposable and all other items for parties are always made from recyclable materials such as paper or bamboo. Kids really love the familiarity of seeing decorations they know and love year after year.

So these are our sustainable celebration traditions, I would love to hear about yours!