Christmas is a time of excess and expectations. We spend over £500 per family on average just on Christmas Day, and over £700 per head on Christmas as a whole. This adds up to over £10 billion on our debit and credit cards each year. Interestingly 10% of men spend over £1000 on gifts, but only 2% of women - now what does that tell us? Is it guilt or generosity?.

There is much you can do to reduce your Christmas excesses and yet keep, or even increase, that festive feeling.

Your local council will have a disposal facility available a few weeks after Christmas, or you can shred and compost Christmas trees just like other garden waste - get yourself a shredder and start composting, or no-dig gardening.

We buy around 5.5 million Christmas trees each year. These trees are grown specifically for the purpose, and help take CO₂ out of the atmosphere, which is clearly a good thing, depending on what you do with the tree after you’ve finished with it. Burning the tree just puts the CO₂ back again.

You can spend over £20 on a Christmas wreath from the garden centre. But once you’ve got yourself the wire base, you can make your own year after year. Use evergreens such as holly, with contrasting red berries, or make one out of household throwaways such as toilet rolls.

• is it from an ethical

We all get them, every year. Sometimes from the same person, each year. When you’re buying for someone make sure you get them something they really want, and if you’re not sure, buy a gift token or think about these alternatives.

Buy gift wrap made from recycled paper. Wrap gifts with string, ribbon or wool, avoiding sticky tape – this makes it easier to re-use the gift wrap as well as lowering your use of plastics.

Or try using gift bags – less wasteful, quicker and easier to re-use, less hassle all round.

What about:

• gift vouchers

We send around 1.7 billion Christmas cards each year in the UK, that’s around 200,000 trees-worth.

There are lots of sites out there, some free, some including a charity donation, some personalised.