Happy Earth Day

It's Earth Day, y'all, so it's the perfect time to take the kids out and do something nice for the planet. Yahoo's The Daily Green blog has a list of various Earth Day freebies and events going on around the country today. For our part, we bought a bunch of ladybugs earlier this week that we've been letting go in the back yard to control the insect population, rather than spray the area down with insecticides. Those wasps building a nest in the eaves of the house, however, are due for a blast of Raid this weekend.

A few of the suggestions from The Daily Green:

Turn old bottles into free products at the Disney Store

Disney stores will offer a number of promotions, including selling $2.50 reusable tote bags that support the Nature Conservancy's Plant a Billion trees in South America's Atlantic Forest campaign. (You can buy your own tree for a dollar directly from TNC.)

What about free stuff?

You can swap three empty bottles for a free commemorative Earth Day reusable water bottle, an approximate value of $8.50, or a free T-shirt, valued at $12.50 for kids or $16.50 for adults. The T-shirts are made from a fabric derived in part from recycled plastics.

Free LED Christmas lights

Christmas in April? That's what Earth Day is to HolidayLEDs.com, which sells energy efficient LED holiday lights on the Web. It's giving away a free string of 200 solar-powered LED Christmas lights to the first 60 visitors to its site, starting at 10 a.m. EST on April 22.

Winners will have to pay $7.99 to have the lights shipped, but that's still a discount off the retail price of $49.99.

Other LED lights are for sale on the site at a 25% discount, and it will offer a 15% discount to anyone who recycles old Christmas lights through April 29. (The recycling program resumes seasonally from October through February.)