Time was you could tell who had a really good Christmas just by looking at their trash cans. The houses with three or four cans overflowing with bags and boxes obviously had a very good time.

Lately, though, it’s gotten to the point where you can’t help but have a pile of trash at the end of the holiday. Everything seems to come in cardboard boxes and blister packs.

It’s not a problem, though. Since the city gave us all big yellow-topped recycling bins, we can just throw most of what used to be trash in those and let someone else separate it somewhere down the line.

That should warm the hearts of people determined to have a non-polluting Christmas.

The other day, though, I heard a suggestion for the dedicated tree huggers. You can recycle your wrapping paper by opening the packages very carefully and using it to wrap other gifts later.

I couldn’t help but think, egad, environmental consciousness is spoiling everything.

One of the customs of Christmas, in my world, anyway, is ripping open packages, throwing the paper all over the place and totaling a room in 15 minutes.

Granted, that method has drawbacks. Almost everybody has accidentally thrown away a small gift while cleaning up in the aftermath of the Christmas frenzy, including one family I once wrote about that tossed a prepaid gift card worth several hundred dollars in the trash.

Now, we can’t even rip open our presents any more without feeling guilty.

Let’s just say I won’t be reusing any gift wrap this year – or any other year, for that matter. The stuff that I use is going straight in the trash, or a recycling bin, where it can be made into something useful, like a disposable cup holder to hold a collection of disposable cups you get when you go to a fast-food restaurant.

Personally I think fussing over something like wrapping paper is silly. If you’re really concerned about it, why wrap gifts at all?

Actually, that is a growing trend.

For years I wrapped gifts in the Sunday comics because the paper was colorful and it was cheap. I’m also very inept at wrapping gifts. They always look like they were wrapped by a 4-year-old, so I figured spending good money on fancy paper would be a real waste.

Later, I started just leaving gifts in the bags that they came in when I bought them. The bag concealed the gift nicely, and it took no work at all.

The trend the last few years is to buy colorful little shopping bags and stick gifts inside of those. What a great idea. It is almost physically impossible to mess that up.

The only problem is that those bags are expensive. The good part, though, is that they are reusable and they keep forever.

A little green shopping bag will stay good as new in a drawer for years, a tree hugger’s dream-come-true.