An easy and fun Christmas tradition is to plant a living Christmas tree in your yard and create a legacy for your family, as you watch the tree grow. For families with plenty of land available, you can plant a tree each year, and even name them for special people, like “Nona’s tree.” Enjoy your decorated tree as the focal point of your living room for a week before planting it, but before you purchase a living tree, consider the full height that this tiny tree will reach.

Noble Fir, Grand Fir and White Pine are classic Christmas trees that can live for a hundred years and reach 60 to 90 feet tall, and thirty feet in width. Is a tree this size appropriate for your yard? If you have a farm with acreage, you are very blessed, and every tree you plant will provide a home and food for wild birds and other critters.

For typical size yards, dwarf Blue Spruce cultivars are excellent choices, with perfect conical shapes and thick foliage. Fat Albert reaches fifteen feet and Blaukissen or Blue Kiss reaches eight feet tall. Zones 2 or 3 to 7. The conifer Chamaecyparis obtusa Compacta reaches ten feet tall, and Aurea 20 feet tall, in Zones 5-8.

Pines do well in warmer areas, and Calabrian Pine, Pinus brutia, has a classic pine tree shape, grows 30 to 80 feet tall, and thrives in heat, drought and wind. Calabrian Pine cannot take temperatures much below zero F. Zones 6-10. This pine and the closely related Eldarica Pine make perfect windbreaks and bird sanctuaries.

All evergreen trees thrive full sun and well-drained soil away from buildings. If soil freezes in your area, to prepare for your living tree, dig a planting hole earlier in the year and fill it with leaves. In cold climates where snow falls and temperatures reach freezing, keep your tree in an unheated garage or on a porch for a few days, to let it acclimate to the warmer temperature of your house.

These trees need cool temperatures, so keep them indoors for only a week, with plenty of light, and away from heaters or fireplaces. Keep the roots moist but not standing in water. In cold climates before planting outdoors, put the tree back on the porch or in the garage for a few days to reaclimate.

I am celebrating the publication of my new book, co-authored with five other writers, “Scrapbook of Christmas Firsts: Stories to Warm Your Heart and Tips to Simplify Your Holiday.”

In our book I wrote many green thumb Christmas tips, including the story of mistletoe, how to grow myrrh, how to keep your poinsettia perky and how to make a wreath of pine cones. I love the gorgeous and electricity saving LED Christmas lights for our trees, and found a neat online store, All American Christmas Company, at www.aachristmas.com that sells these lights, and www.homedepot.com also sells them. Consumer Reports issued a report lauding LED lights.

Each thing we do, every day, and especially at Christmas, can help the environment. I suggest that folks use gift bags instead of wrap, and re-use the bags many times. I found foil gift bags in gold and in green at a dollar store, and use them for birthdays, Christmas and any gift occasion. So for a fully green Christmas, you could purchase the ideal living tree, light it with LED lights and fill re-usable gift bags with presents under the tree.

Terra Hangen writes numerous devotionals and articles on prayer, gardening, faith, nature and wildlife. Her publishing history includes national print and online publications such as Vibrant Life, Dog Fancy, Lutheran Digest, Flower and Garden, and Hobby Farms and an essay in the Rainy Day Book. Terra and her family enjoy living on the Monterey Bay in California.

Making the change to Go Green is not very simple to many consumers. Going Green is being advertised and talked about all the time, but some people just don’t care to change.

It is very difficult to make a change unless you understand that “going green” is not a change after all, it’s just going back to basics.

My family and I have been eco-friendly all our lives. Funny enough though, we didn’t do it for the environment, we did it for our pockets. We couldn’t afford to be wasteful and abuse on our resources.

Realizing how my parents and grandparents lived, makes me feel that going green is extremely simple. There’s nothing new about it. We just need to understand that it is simply learning how things were done in past generations. This can make a big difference in our planet and in our finances.

After so many years, I can clearly recall my dad yelling accross the house “turn off the lights!”,” shut the doors!”, “why is the TV on?” He was the electricity police. It was so annoying. He was so cheap. We will make fun of him by telling him he only breathed because air was free. Who would’ve known, now he is the cool man. Mr. Eco-Friendly.

My mom was just as bad. She refused to buy paper towels, and if she did, a roll will last almost a year. She will actually rince the paper towel and lay it to dry. I’m not lying. I learned how to turn on a dishwasher after getting married. My mother will use the dishwasher to store dishes. She’ll reuse glass containers to store left-overs. The cloth dryer was non existant. She will line dry instead. I don’t remember ever having disposable cups or plates in our house, not even for party’s. Times were tough, and going green was the way to live.

I definitely, didn’t continue all their practices. Times have changed, and I just can’t see myself not using the dryer, or discontinue the use of disposable diapers. There are some modern things that are just too convenient to let pass by. We can, though, re-condition ourselves to going back to basic practices. “Going Green” is easy. It’s just committing to make a couple of small changes in our own household. Just imagine the difference it will make in our environment, if each household in the United States (population of over 300 million) made a commitment to go green in just one way.

Every day the price of gas continues to skyrocket out of control, and analysts see no end in sight. While the cost of gas goes significantly higher, and the ability for most average individuals to afford gas becomes considerably harder, the big oil companies continue to profit, unaffected by the rising costs of gas and actually beating their own record numbers with absolutely no accountability. Politicians do not even seem to be lifting a finger to stop this obvious abuse of power.

Luckily, an alternative fuel method is slowly being distributed online that provides a way to run your car on water, allowing you to save thousands of dollars every year at the gas tank, as well as provide some relief for the polluted environment. These systems allow you car not only to run on gas, but also on standard H2O, like that you get from your sink. Your car will become more environmentally friendly and you will be saving so much money it will be as though the gas prices were back at 1.00 again.

This is quite possible one of the most explosive secrets that oil companies have carefully guarded for over twenty years. Why, you may be thinking? Plain and simply, an informed public would be very bad for the oil business! Fortunately, this cutting-edge technology has quickly grown in popularity due to its effectiveness and word of mouth buzz. Public awareness has elevated with the invent of the internet so it’s much harder now to hide with information / knowledge at the tips of you fingers.

So, the real truth is (like mentioned above) the technology to make a car run on water is anything but new and was patented many years ago. Mechanical devices that use minute amounts of electricity from your automobile’s battery to break apart water into HHO gas were created awhile ago. HHO (AKA Brown’s gas or Hydroxy) is recognized by experts to burn very well and gives loads of energy.

And the best part about this HHO gas is that the end result is not more emissions. Rather, after the HHO gas has been used, the Hydrogen gas actually turns back into water. So you are doing your part to fight global warming as well as improve your car’s gas mileage.

This will provide you with no only relief at the pump, but relief for your mind as well. As more and more people switch to this type of gas supplement and start to power their cars on water, the savings at the pump will be thousands of dollars per year, and the savings for the environment even more valuable. And best of all, you can put this technology together in no time, at home, using tools and equipment you already have.

The systems for producing HHO gas are so easy to build that anyone can do it, even without science or automobile knowledge. All you need is a few parts from a local hardware or automobile store, and you can create this engine supplement to run your car one water in as little as a few hours. All you need to do is follow the advice in one of the water car step by step guides, and within a few days you will be tripling your gas mileage, avoiding high gas prices, and helping to prevent pollution to the environment.

When it comes to controlling the cost of gas, you can either let the gas companies force you to pay their incredibly high costs, profiting off your misfortune. Or you can turn your car into one that runs on water, triple your gas mileage as well as improve the environment, all for just a little bit of time and even less money. Within less than a month, you will have saved twice the amount of the cost of building the water car addition, without any of the environmental damage.

People are discussing how skyrocketing gas prices are bashing Americans today. The middle class will soon be gone since the dollar has dropped like a rock and OPEC / oil tycoons are unregulated to do what they want. This is an assault on our freedom and we need to take back what we’ve lost.

Many Americans seem concerned with the jack-up in prices at the gas pump. Few are taking action, though. People now want to see alternative forms of fuel like hydrogen, solar, and water. Problem is, only a few have decided to take advantage of this inexpensive technology.

For example, did you know that everyday Americans are saving hundreds per month on gasoline because they’ve converted their cars to water powered hybrids? You probably think that I’m joking, but this is the fact. It’s been proven for many years that you can literally double your gas mileage and have cleaner emissions with this simple technology.

Ask yourself Why you haven’t heard about cheap technological advances to increase fuel mileage? Most people have either been killed or silenced with money when you get down to the nitty-gritty. We live in a world dependent on the oil companies and many are scared to even attempt to sever the ties.

You must understand that oil industry conglomerates have been influencing your thinking since you were born via the mainstream media. Everyone has heard that other other forms of energy are much too costly and “they” are trying to find an alternative. It’s only business folks! They gouge prices simply because they can because they know you’ll pay whatever the heck they want.

Wake up folks! Fuel prices for autos and any other vehicle will never come down! What’s congress doing about it? Unfortunately, our law-makers are “lobbied” by the oil industry daily so it’s not in their best interest to push legislation that helps Americans. We have to become more innovative with our approach to other forms of gas.

We can cease reliance on foreign oil once and for all and the first step is to implement the other proven, safe alternatives we have now. I highly recommend converting your car to one that uses HHO technology, as I have first-hand experience with it’s effectiveness. You can find a simple, cheap conversion manual online (see below) that will allow you to save loads of cash every month at the pump. Run your car on water for a few weeks and rest assured, you’ll be kicking yourself for not using this technology earlier.

Don’t be a victim of high gas prices! This powerful knowledge will help you immensely. You can go and watch major news stories on YouTube about the water for gas craze. One of my videos that will help empower you is called “Are High Gas Prices a Scam?