Looking for some green gift ideas for Christmas? There are a number of resources online to help:

• TreeHugger.com has their annual holiday gift guide with 12 categories and over 100 gifts. Everything you can think of is covered here from gifts for the Foodie to the DIY’er in your life.
• Porter McConnell writes a blog called “Slow Christmas” where she writes about how to do things like skipping the craziness of the mall and actually enjoying the holiday season. Take a look at the about page of her blog — I couldn’t agree with her more!
• Yahoo has a product-centric green gift guide for the holidays. While there are a number of questionable so-called green gifts here (especially the green gadgets), Yahoo does try to explain themselves with a blurb on each product on “Why it’s green”. Yahoo’s guide is an aggregator of sorts - a number of products they list are recommended by well known green Internet sites (which they link to).
• There are a number of great social networking pages such a the Facebook Group pages “Green Christmas” and “Lets have a GREEN CHRISTMAS” that have ongoing discussions and user contributed posts
• For the green geek in your life check out CNET’s Holiday Gift Guide which highlights super efficient tech gadgets. However, watch out for the gimmicks like the solar clad Samsung Blue Earth phone.

Here’s a couple interesting ideas I came across:

• If you are sending a gift to someone this Christmas consider using UPS carbon neutral shipping. Essentially UPS estimates that carbon emission of your shipment and purchases carbon credits to offset them (passing the costs along to you of course). Even better, through 2010 UPS will match the carbon offsets purchased for the first one million dollars.
• I’ve seen a few articles on renting a live Christmas tree lately. An example is RentXmasTree.com which Rents out live Christmas trees to folks in the central coastal California area. The company grows potted pine, cedar, redwood and cypress trees which are dropped off at your door to be rented for the holiday season. Afterwards they are picked up and tended to during the year until the next Christmas.

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If you’re about to decorate your home with lights this holiday season I’d like to remind you to use Energy Star labelled products.  Energy Star light string for your tree or outdoor lighting are made up of LEDs (Light emitting diodes) which are very efficient as compared to the old incandescent bulbs we have traditionally used.  LED light strings have been around for number of years and have been shown to be quite durable and reliable - not to mention good for the planet.

In fact, energy star light string typically use 90% less energy than incandescents producing the same amount of light and often pay for themselves in energy savings over the lifetime of the bulbs.

Some other benefits of LED decorative lighting include:

• They can last up to 10 times longer than incandescent bulbs (25,000 hours or around 10 years of use) - no more trips to the hardware store to buy replacement bulbs
• Because they are encased in hard plastic instead of glass they are more durable
• LED light strings are much more shock resistant than incandescent light strings due to the lack of a filament
• LED light strings are cool to the touch making them easier to handle and reducing the risk of fire
• LED lights can be strung together safely.  Whereas with a typical 50-light string of incandescent bulbs you can safely connect 3 strings end-to-end, with LED light strings, according to the Consumer Reports Safety Blog, you can safely string together as many as 50

According to the EnergyStar.gov website, “If all decorative light strings sold in America this year were ENERGY STAR qualified, we would save over 2 billion kWh per year and reduce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to nearly 300,000 cars!”

Many local energy utilities and some retailers (such as Home Depot) provide incentives for trading in their incandescent holiday lights for LED holiday lights — be sure to try and take advantage of these incentives to help offset the typically 20-30% premium that LED holiday lights command over incandescent ones.

Take a look here for a selection of LED Holiday lights.