Having just spent the past hour or so wrapping presents I recalled a bone of contention I have with my sister-in-law.
Basically, she doesn’t believe in wrapping presents! She thinks is more fun for children to see all their presents sitting unopened ready to be played with. Whereas I, and all right-thinking people, believe that unwrapping presents is half the fun.
I asked this question to a few colleagues at work and to my surprise opinion on this most important subject seems fairly evenly split.
Wrap, in most cases. My kids always had one thing out and ready to play with (usually large things like a bike or a dollhouse) and visible stuff peeking out of the top of their stocking. But it seems to me that while waking up and seeing a bunch of colorfully wrapped packages under the tree is breathtakingly exciting, seeing a bunch of toys would just lead to sensory overload.
Plus, unwrapping is fun, and Mom keeps things from being a chaotic mess by doing the “Okay, here’s a present for Blobby. What is it, Blobby? Hold it up so we all can see!” thing.
Definitely wrap the gifts, although I do like the gift bags, because they’re easier to reuse. And if the gifts are toys for younger kids, you might want to open up the packages and remove those annoying plastic ties and insert batteries in advance. It’s very annoying to try to do so Christmas morning when the kid is jumping up and down wanting to play with the new toy.
I’ve always wrapped even though I feel guilty about the mass of paper it wastes. Sometimes, I recycle brown bags and once or twice purchased pretty fabric bags that can be reused by the recipient. These days we really only do gifts for my daughter and son, so it won’t be so much of an issue. I can use our reusable bags or pashminas for daughter’s gifts and I have to mail the boy’s out, so it goes in a box I recycle from work if its big or an envelope if its small.
YES! I forgot to mention. DO remove excessive packaging for little ones before wrapping. Nothing is more frustrating than having to wait a half hour while someone with sharp things butchers a box while mumbling bad words under their breath to free the 929 tiny little pieces to your My Little Pony Exclusive Deluxe Playset Canterlot Castle.
This only works with folks who do the “Christmas morning” thing. My family always celebrated on the eve, so there wasn’t going to be a practical time to get the kids away from the tree and the area of the house where gifts were stored for long enough to assemble the pile of presents for the big reveal. We’d wrap presents, then put them under the tree sometime in mid-December. Until then, my mom would hide the presents someplace sneaky for as long as she could.
I love to both wrap presents and unwrap them. I try to reuse as much as I can and always have that in mind when I buy my wrapping products in the first place.
Growing up, we opened family presents Christmas Eve, but presents from Santa came Christmas morning. The family gifts were wrapped, whereas the big Santa presents and stocking stuffers were not.
To me this makes perfect sense. Besides, it helped keep the mystique alive among skeptical children…no “Why did Santa wrap his presents with the exact same paper that we have in the closet?” But, to my husband, this was complete blasphemy. Of course Santa wraps gifts! So there we always were, wrapping Santa’s gifts at midnight on Christmas Eve. (Not to mention having to label them in non-Mom or Dad-looking handwriting). Not my idea of a good time. But he insists.
I always got up in the middle of the night to “go to the bathroom” on Christmas Eve and take a peek. Can’t do that if they’re all wrapped. My daughter sleeps like the dead, and even as a young child on Christmas morning, she usually woke up well after me. She’s 15 now, so the Santa thing is pretty much a non-issue now.
Part of me feels like using a bag is the easy way out. It’s also not as satisfying for me to open, personally. And, when wrapping, I can throw on the radio and listen to Christmas music and just enjoy being excited about seeing people open the presents I’m going to give them.
I love wrapping, even though I suck at it, currently. Someday, the packages that I bestow upon my loved ones will not have a) rugged edges on the paper, where the scissors have slipped (in my defense, I’m left-handed), b) “patches” where I underestimated how much paper I would need and have tried to make up for gaps and c) too much paper, and consequently those big “poofs” of paper you get when you’ve overestimated how much you’ll need. Just gotta work on those spatial skills
One year the dog chewed the tags off all the presents, so we didn’t know whose was whose. That year was REALLY fun. It almost made us always want to do it.
Bicycles and bouncy horses are impossible to wrap, but Santa brings those and just sets them under the tree.
Guitars are also hard to wrap. Well, not so much hard to wrap, but very hard to disguise.
Always wrapped, sometimes even the big ones. I was about four when my parents wrapped a whole rocking horse! They used the sunday comics and knowing what was under the super-neat wrapping job was part of the magic.
Dad was terrible at wrapping-- everything was tootsie-roll style. It got so he didn’t have to write his name on the present (he never used tags). What a good thing to remember. Thanks OP!
That does sound fun. One of my most favorite fun things my mom did was trick one of her brothers into wrapping a package for himself.
She asked him to help wrap a package for the other brother, so he helped fill this large box with a bunch of wrapped smaller boxes. Some were empty and others were weighted with rocks or candy. And then come Christmas Eve, she hands this box to him instead of the other brother.
Watching him unwrap all those boxes to get to the actual present was hilarious. Because of course he’d been so devious when he helped her with the box. He put tons of tape on, put boxes inside of boxes and all sorts of stuff.
Everything except what Santa brought gets wrapped. If nothing is wrapped and under the tree beforehand, what do you spend weeks shaking and poking and trying to figure out what it is? And how do you take part in the communal tradition that is the Ripping o’ the Paper? I mean, really.
Presents get wrapped and put under the tree as they get bought, except for things that should not be poked, prodded, fondled, shaken, or otherwise investigated through the paper (though those things usually come from Santa, as they’re often difficult/annoying to wrap). Santa comes and makes his deposits. Santa wraps nothing; he’s busy enough trying to make and deliver all that stuff, much less having to wrap it all too. At or around 4:45 AM, children arise and begin crowing over the non-stocking Santa gifts. When said crowing becomes utterly intolerable, parents emerge and the stockings may be unloaded. After the stockings are thoroughly dissected, a round of gifts is passed around the family, and the Ripping o’ the Paper begins. After the Ripping, children play with the things Santa brought while parents wrestle and cuss their way through the packaging on the other stuff.
