A couple of years ago, I bought Mrs. Blue Sky a pearl necklace (not the ZZ Top kind :D). I did the old box-in-a-box-in-a-box trick. That only works once, though.
Last year I got her matching earrings & a bracelet. I had also gotten her some tall glass storage jars (thankfully, none were damaged) and his the items inside the jars. She had gotten two sets and opened the “regular” ones first. She did not open the other ones until a couple of days later. Needless to say (but I’ll say it any way), she was thrilled.
This year, the only thing she’s hinted at is an amethyst bracelet. I have indicated that it’s just not in the budget.
I lied, of course, and I got it today. However, this year’s surprise wrapping is a bit more sinister. I’m in charge of setting up the tree (albeit artificial - best $100 I ever spent) and taking it down and trying to cram it back into it’s box (which will never happen, I have to use two boxes). She’s in charge of decorating. She puts the stuff on the tree and takes it back down.
I bought a clear, hollow glass ornament today and am going to paint it gold and put the bracelet in it. I won’t put it on the tree until a couple of days before Christmas and even then I’m going to put it near the middle and around back.
That way, a week or so later, she’ll find it as she’s packing everything away.
More packaging than disguising: a couple years back I got transparent plastic takeout boxes at Organized Living and used Quark to make paper inserts with the giftee’s name. They went over pretty well.
I just bought a wooden puzzle box for a friend of mine. (Hard to describe if you don’t already know what I’m talking about; but it’s made of two different woods, light and dark, designed to look like a small box wrapped in ribbon and with a bow on top. And there’s a secret way to open it.)
I want to find light brown wrapping paper and a dark brown ribbon and wrap this to look like what it is. So it’s the box-within-a-box thing, but the inner box is the present. And I’ll hide something inside for when he figures out how to open it.
When I was a teenager, my family had developed a game of making packages hard to open. It started out with just using lots of Scotch tape, but escalated…
I won the year I used metal strapping to enclose the box prior to wrapping it, and then covered the wrapping completely with packing tape. The strapping was sufficient such that the gift could not be removed, even after cutting the box out. (I’d borrowed the equipment for the strapping from my new brother-in-law, who kindly brought along the cutters that eventually enabled the recipient to access the gift.)
Somehow the game kinda died out after that.
I’ve done the box-in-box, along with the many-small-boxes-inside-one-giant-box. We do lots of creative wrapping to hide the nature of gifts, especially obvious ones, and put packages out early so that everyone can try to guess anyway. Much fun making everyone give their best guess before opening each one.
I’d never thought of hiding one so that they don’t get it until several days after the event. That’s a great idea, except I just know it would get lost somehow.
I cured a family member of shaking presents by buying her a stuffed animal and putting it into a large box along with a smaller box full of broken glass. She picked it up, gave it a good shake… “ksssh-ksssh-ksssh!” :eek: :smack: :wally
You’d probably better put something like a label on the back of it with the words in fine print “open me for a gift” on it, just to be sure that she won’t have to unpack all the ornaments to find it if she doesn’t find it while disassembling the tree. Sweet idea though.
I never wrap in a sinister way–if I wrap things at all. But every year, I dread my husband’s newest idea for a joke. He’s done the old box-within-a-box-within-a-box-within-a-box-within-a-box trip,and don’t even get me started on the newspaper incident.
For years, my sister and I competed for the title of Most Annoying Gifter. One year, she hid my Christmas present under my own bed, confident that I wouldn’t clean under there for weeks. We’ve both done the treasure hunt gift - a box with a clue, leading to an ornament with another clue, leading to, oh, I dunno, the fridge where there was another clue taped to the ketchup, leading to another clue… you get the idea. We’ve done the box-inside-a-box-inside-a-box thing, and the giant box stuffed with garbage (not stinky garbage, just paper and such, and hiding a tiny box with the actual gift inside). One year she said all she wanted for Christmas was cold hard cash, so naturally I filled a jar with quarters and water and froze it. The year I gave her a necklace, I wrapped the box in an enormous ball of yarn - the thing was the size of a volleyball - and she had to unroll it for almost twenty minutes to get to the box.
Ethilrist - my sister-in-law is a box rattler, too, and I did almost the same thing to her. I filled a mayonnaise jar with broken glass and wrapped a T-shirt (her actual gift) around it. (it’s very important when the box-rattler shakes the box that you gasp convincingly.) The idea worked so well that since then, everyone in the family has been packaging her gifts with bells, rattles, and other noisy stuff.
Duct tape and garbage bags. And a margarine container. And cat food.
I got my sister a pullover for Christmas last year and I wanted to make it hard to figure out what was inside the package, so I folded the thing, filled two margarine containers of different sizes with a little cat food, wrapped that in newspaper, and then wrapped that with a splayed-open garbage bag, which I then sealed in a haphazard manner with duct tape. Lots of duct tape.
