If you haven’t sent your wish list to Santa c/o the (melting) North Pole, now might be the time to revise it. With the glaciers melting at a ferocious pace, we are wondering if the elves’ time might be better spent working on creating environmentally-friendly carbon neutral gifts.

But seriously, the big question among environmentalists this year is how green can Christmas really be? The entire holiday seems to be the antithesis of what our world needs right now. Some Christmas by-products are obvious and include leftover wrapping paper, stacks of cardboard boxes, plastics and the tree itself.

The less obvious in the aftermath is the inordinate amount of time and fuel one spent trying to find the “perfect” gift, the holiday flights taken to visit the family or escape the Christmas madness; and there is always the question about the gifts themselves.

While organic sweaters and fair-trade chocolate can come in handy in the cold winter months, are you ever really going to use those novelty presents from Aunt Matilda (i.e. the Clapper and the vibrating slippers)?

To make Christmas easy on the conscious, the wallet, and the earth, why not become the first green Santa in your family? Guides for greening your Christmas can now be found almost anywhere on the Internet. A good start is TreeHugger’s 2007 Gift Guide. And there is a book for educating children, “When Santa Turned Green,” that has received some positive reviews.

But the next step to lightening the carbon load would simply be to give less. Here are a few ideas:

How about sending an email to your gift-giving circle of family and friends suggesting ways to give back to the planet this year? Education about global warming is an important step in making our world carbon neutral.

We don’t know about your family, but our mom always loves it when we give her something personal and handmade, especially when it’s from recycled material.

If you’re not the crafty type, you could always give someone a tonne of air – carbon neutral air that is. See Neco, an online eco-shop based in Australia, that advertises a one tonne deficit of carbon for $25 AUD (about $22 US). The gift comes with a card printed on recycled paper, no less.

Native Energy is offering the same deal, but offsets are half the price at $12 a tonne or $72 for a six-pack. Why the big price difference? We’d be interested in hearing your feedback. Ho, ho, ho!