Used to enjoy it but now it has become festive drudgery.
Many years ago I would get all creative with eclectic household wrapping materials.
Old used calendars were great for wrapping. Plain brown paper bags. Sunday paper inserts.
Small tea towels or hand towels.
Old clothes - yes it can be done lol. I would scour thrift stores for uniquely holiday colors and patterns.
One could even wash out a potato chip bag and wrap it silver side up. Yes I did this but it’s too labor intensive.
I used to hot glue little Christmas buttons and other assorted miniature tchotchkes on the finished product.
These days it’s just a happy holiday bag on most occasions.
I reuse these bags when I get them for other wrapping or for taking stuff back and forth to work. Occasionally I use them as storage containers in closets.
I used to use old Sunday comics, especially for kids’ presents. But we haven’t got a newspaper since about 2002. So I keep wrapping paper on hand and reuse gift bags quite often.
My son used to meticulously wrap gifts so the corners were evenly and beautifully done.
To me that is a magic I have not been able to access in my lifetime. I’m lucky if I can get sufficient paper to gird the loins of the gift. I hate when some gifts demand mathematical skills and possibly calculus to finish.
I used to love looking at all the gifts wrapped and set under the tree on Christmas Eve. Good memories.
Ha, this is what I came in to say. When I was young, single and very broke, I couldn’t afford gifts and wrapping paper, so newspaper it was. The Sunday funny papers I saved as “fancy” gift wrap for the very nicest presents.
As I got older and slightly more affluent, I could better afford giftwrap, but I never got very good at wrapping presents. So to this day, I will often just get a gift bag and be done with it.
I pour a whiskey, put on “A Christmas Story,” and neatly wrap and label everything that’s in a box, everything else goes into gift bags. We bought a big box of bulk wrapping paper years ago that we’re still working through.
The rest of us are adepts, with the pretty paper and matching tags. Sometimes we will resort to stick-on bows, but special gifts always get the curling ribbon.
My mother-in-law died in 2007…I am just now coming to the end of her holiday wrapping stash.
Gift bags are the best; no wrapping (aside from using some tissue on top of the gift to hide it) and indefinitely reusable. Gift wrap, on other hand, is a pain. Those little rolls of wrap at the Hallmark store or elsewhere are really expensive for perhaps a ten-foot long roll. And the paper is so thin that it tears really easily.
Once I bought a toy for a friend’s child’s birthday party. Then I had to buy a roll of child’s birthday themed gift wrap, a bow and a card. All of that cost almost as much as the toy and then I had children’s gift wrap in the closet for years before tossing it. Now I try to shop at stores that offer free or paid gift wrapping service.
Nobody really cares about your beautiful gift wrapping, and fifteen minutes after the presents are opened, the paper is in the trash. An exception would be a beautiful, special gift-- like an engagement ring, for example.
Here’s my “wrapped” stash in my bedroom, ready to go under my step-grandson’s tree. I put multiple gifts for the same person in the giant bags (from Dollar Tree-- the bags, not the gifts… ).
I haven’t done it for years (no nearby surviving family), but I was always moderately elaborate and “secure” (people joked about how hard they were to open). People did seem to appreciate it, I’d generally wrap a lot of other people’s presents for them. A common thing was looping one or more ribbons over the whole package in various patterns, then sticking bows on some of the intersections. Secured under the bows and the bottom of the package with tape to prevent slippage.
I also made a point of trying to hide what it was. When I had an odd-shaped gift and there weren’t any extra boxes I’d sometimes take scrap cardboard and tape together an improvised semi-box around the gift to disguise the shape. I only used gift bags if really out of time or energy.
We have Christmas gift boxes which are probably 60 years old which we still use. Lots of small gift bags. We save boxes throughout the year to put presents in.
As the family and the pile of presents under the tree has grown we aren’t as elaborate as we used to be. We used to disguise smaller presents by wrapping them in several layers of boxes. We’ve been known to put a brick into a package to confuse the recipient.
Last year because we had Christmas at our daughter’s in Indiana I wrapped pictures of presents, so we didn’t have to drag a big garden tool, say, back on the plane.
Either festive rolls of paper or gift bags from last year. Back when I gave lots of presents, I’d make sure to buy paper on the 26th when it was super-reduced and save it for the next year. These days, only my grandkids get gifts, so a roll of paper can last for years. I’m not an over-indulgent grandmother - I leave that to my son-in-law’s mother. I give the kids a couple of token gifts to upwrap and a chunk of cash into their bank accounts. Ever practical, that’s me.
Nice papers, washi tape and decent cloth or gold ribbons, bows, occasional forays into complex Japanese no-tape wrapping techniques for books - wrapping is still a joy, not a chore.
Although one year I did try just Kraft for the paper, and plain red and green masking tapes. It was very nice, but it was the break from the norm that made it work, I suspect.
I don’t do anything “creative” or unusual – it’s always standard Christmas gift wrap, usually the shiny foil kind, with colour-coordinated ribbon and a stick-on pre-made bow of the same colour. Depending on the number of gifts, I’ll alternate between three or four different wrapping papers.
Every year I buy a pile of bandannas from Canteen which sells them to support young people with cancer. Anything that can’t get wrapped in one goes in a gift bag or remains unwrapped. Mind you, I don’t give gifts to many people in any organized manner.
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