Christmas is a season full of decadence. No expense is spared in terms of lavish meals, decorations, Christmas trees, and of course, presents. But that is what it's all about, right? We spend crazy amounts of hard-earned money and wait in tireless lines on Black Friday, so we can make sure we can give the best Christmas ever to those we care about.

Even though this is a season that is supposed to be all about giving, I don't think we take the time to think about what we are taking from the environment.

An article submission on sustainable living at eartheasy.com had these facts to say about Christmas:

1. Half of the total paper that the U.S. consumes each year is used to wrap consumer products.

2. In the U.S., the annual trash from gift-wrap and shopping bags totals over four million tons as compared to Canada where the annual waste equals about 545,000 tons. If everyone wrapped just three gifts in reusable paper, it would save enough paper to cover 45,000 hockey rinks.

3. The number of cards sold in the U.S during the holiday season would fill a football field 10 stories high, and requires the harvesting of nearly 300,000 trees.

4. Each year, 50 million Christmas trees are purchased in the U.S. Of those, about 30 million go to the landfill, and make sure to add in the carbon cost in transporting all these trees to the landfill.

5. Although plastic Christmas trees are reusable from year to year, they are made of petroleum products (PVC), and use up resources in both the manufacturing and shipping. While artificial trees theoretically "last forever," research shows that they are typically discarded when repeated use makes them less attractive. Discarded artificial trees are then sent to landfills, where their plastic content makes them non-recyclable and non-biodegradable, meaning they will sit in that landfill for centuries, thus "lasting forever."

As it turns out, our friends across the pond are not doing so great when it comes to their environmental footprint either. An article posted on independent.co.uk in September of 2015 had this to say about UK waste fallout from Christmas 2006 (a record breaking year):

1. More than a billion Christmas cards—17 for every man, woman and child—will be delivered this year. That's enough to stretch around the world five times.

2. Fifty-two square miles of wrapping paper—enough to gift-wrap the island of Jersey—will be ripped off by Boxing Day.

3. Up to 125,000 tons of plastic packaging will end up in the trash.

4. Six million trees have been bought, but only 1.2 million will be recycled. The rest will be left to rot or be thrown away.

5. Shops sell 16 million turkeys and 830 million sprouts. Up to 40 percent of holiday food is wasted.

6. Turkey foil wrap will create 3,000 tons of waste.

7. Within three months, 41 percent of the toys children receive will be broken. Most will go to landfills.

8. Many will get the latest mobile phone, but only 10 to 15 percent are recycled.

While you're enjoying this holiday season with your loved ones, make sure to remember all the little things you take for granted. If we aren't careful now, we may not have an earth to take advantage of in the future.