The rampant consumerism at this time of the year can really get you down. Well it gets me down at any rate. I've been looking increasingly over the last few years at alternatives that aren't going to cost the Earth, literally.

Wrapping paper is one key item that I resent spending money on. OK, so it isn't exactly a huge expense. You can pick up a couple of cheap rolls of paper for less than a quid. It will be really thin, mind, and rip easily. But still it is fairly cheap, especially when you consider it is simply going to get ripped right off.

But it is all such a waste. Then there are the Christmas cards. And decorations.

So what else can you do? Here's some ideas, a few of which you and the kids can have fun doing together if you like. It also teaches them about recycling, and ways they can make good use of everything.

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Last week, fellow PlayPennies writer Tamsin wrote a feature post on Make Your Own Christmas Wrapping Paper. To be honest, I thought that sounded a bit easy. Get some paper and have your child crayon a bit. What I didn't realise was that in actual fact it would be the best crafty fun we'd have together pre-Christmas AND the end result looked fabulous!

I have a roll of paper - it's fairly low quality I guess, kind of like wallpaper liner but thinner and smaller. It cost very little from Ikea, and has the massive advantage of being able to pull as much off as you want. I couldn't find it online, on the Ikea website, but I did find these rolls of drawing paper on Amazon.

My son (5 and a half) asked for his crayons and glitter. I also had some ribbon (I keep all the odd bits and pieces of ribbon you get throughout the year in a container).

The first lot of wrapping paper was particularly special. This was for his class teacher, who he has a wee crush on, and he put a lot of thought into every picture he drew on there, and the exact mix of glitter colours used! It might look like just random blobs to the untrained eye, but trust me, there was a lot of method in that madness.

He'd run out of creative steam on the next piece of wrapping paper, this was for his teaching assistant (who is lovely). He just wanted to draw stars and Christmas trees.  This is when I had a brainwave. I am useless at drawing stars (as you can see from above), and besides I wanted it all to be his work as much as possible. Minimal input from mummy!

So I had the idea of using a cookie cutter. This came from the Salter Kids In The Kitchen baking set we were lucky enough to review back in the summer. I don't think that a week goes by where we don't get this set out although this is the first time we weren't able to eat the end result!

I got the star shaped cookie cutter, and he was able to hold it on the paper, fill it in with PVA glue, and then when the glitter was shaken off he had a near perfect star.

He loved using the glitter. I keep old plastic containers from when we have Chinese takeaways, and he used one as a sort of palette for mixing up some of the colours. But also, he poured the glitter right from the containers - I took the shaker part off the top. This was of course risky! But he wanted to have the stars half one colour, and half another colour, and that wasn't possible using the shaker. I bought the glitter shakers from The Early Learning Centre over a year ago now - they are lasting well! Several birthdays and two Christmases and I still have about a third left in the pots.

This was a massive hit! He loved that he was creating something that looked so good, and very carefully planned out six stars across the paper. Although after he was a bit critical and thought he'd perhaps done too many stars! Interspersed between the stars are crayoned Christmas trees.

What we used for this project:

• Roll of drawing paper
• Crayons
• Glitter
• PVA Glue
• Scissors
• Ribbon