Lentils are so 2013 – an on-trend guide to glitter alternatives

Tops Day has banned the use of glitter sparkles at its nurseries. Photograph: Getty Images/iStockphoto

A nursery chain has identified glitter as a harmful pollutant, and banned children from using it when making Christmas decorations this year. Instead, Tops Day Nurseries is now promoting rice and lentils as substitute festive materials. However, not everyone has access to rice and lentils, so here are some other environmentally friendly glitter alternatives.

Pasta

When I was at nursery in the 80s, I glued some rigatoni to a cardboard circle, spraypainted it silver and gave it to my mum as a tree decoration. It remains in use, because a pasta Christmas decoration isn’t just for Christmas; it is for a lifetime of resentfully making your Christmas tree look as if it was furnished by a hamfisted berk.

Related: Nurseries ban glitter in pre-Christmas drive for cleaner seas

Quinoa

Lentils are so 2013. If you really want kids to flaunt their lefty credentials, then it’s quinoa or nothing. A lentil-covered decoration says: “I care about the environment”, but quinoa says: “I care about the environment and recognising the ancestral practices of the indigenous Andean people”.

Not all that’s Christmassy is glitter: children use lentils and rice to make pictures at Tops Day Nurseries. Photograph: PA/Andrew Matthews

Sausage roll particles

Greggs ruined Christmas by ramming a sausage roll into a manger and passing it off as the baby Jesus. What an amazing PR move it would be for Greggs to obliterate its remaining stocks of sacrilegious pastry and hand out the remnants to children as a more thoughtful glitter proxy.

Ground-up diamonds

Pasta, quinoa and pastry are all well and good, but they just don’t glitter like glitter does. So here is what Tops Day Nurseries should do: encourage kids to rifle through their mothers’ jewellery, smash the prettiest items up with a hammer and glue whatever is left on to a Christmas card or whatever. Finally, Christmas can be twinkly again.

Microbeads

With the government’s ban on microplastics about to come into force, it presumably means that there will be a ton of microbeads suddenly milling around without purpose, freed from the lotions and toothpastes that once housed them. What better way to celebrate their newfound emancipation than by getting children to hurl fistfuls of the stuff at the sky, ground and sea? Merry Christmas!