{12 Days of Christmas Traditions} Day Eight: Wrapping

I LOVE wrapping presents.  And like I mentioned in this post, one day I hope to take on Melanie's tradition and have a girls weekend with my sister and sister-in-laws where we get all of our shopping and wrapping done in one fell swoop.  But while I live in Scotland, I depend on my friend The Internet for the shopping part.  As far as wrapping goes, I try to wrap a little each night so that on Christmas Eve, I'm not up till 2 am like I was last year.  I don't want to be super tired on Christmas morning while my kids are feverishly undoing all of my hard wrapping work!  Christmas Eve is for stuffing stockings and putting out Santa's gift, not wrapping my own!  Here is our tree so far.  I'm about halfway there, but the other half is coming on an airplane with my in-laws tomorrow!

All of the presents are way back behind the tree so as to not tempt little hands

I wanted to share a few wrapping traditions I've borrowed from other bloggers (plus a few of my own):

Blogger Tip #1
Shay's organizational tips for wrapping: put all of your wrapping tools in a tote bag, so it's easy to haul to the living room each night for wrapping while watching cheesy Hallmark Christmas movies (I've slightly tweaked her method).

You'll notice that I have packing tape in my tote.  That would be because I wrap all of my kids gifts inside of a cardboard box (usually leftover from an Amazon order though some are actually moving boxes!).  I do this for a few reasons:

#1 My kids are little and shiny packages are hard to resist.  Avery's already opened one present, but since the toys are inside a plain cardboard box,  I have those few extra seconds to catch her before she gets the box open and ruins the surprise for Christmas morning.

#2 Original toy packaging is usually a weird shape, is awkward to wrap, and can induce feelings like this on Christmas morning. So if you take the toy out of the box, put it in a plain cardboard box, and then wrap it, you've killed two birds with one stone.  You just have to remember a good pair of scissors on Christmas morning to get through the packing tape.

Also in my tote:
--wrapping paper
--scissors
--regular tape
--double stick tape for when I want to be ultra perfectionist wrapper
--tulle for bows - you can get tulle by the roll super cheap at big discount party suppliers like Arne's for you Houston people - it's a much better value than fancy wire Christmas bows (though I LOVE those too) and it's very easy to make your bow look pretty without taking a lot of time

--gift tags from Costco (taken out of the box and put in a ziplock):

I buy gift tags that I can tie on my presents instead of the stick-on kind.  This way, I can reuse the ones for our immediate family each Christmas instead of buying new tags every year.  For our wider family, I buy inexpensive ornaments to use as tags and write with a sharpie on the back of them.  This is probably only something I will do while living in Scotland since even though they come from a store that is basically the British equivalent of Walmart, they come all the way from Scotland which increases their value significantly.

--Christmas tissue paper:

I like to wrap toddler gifts in tissue paper instead of wrapping paper because it's easier for them to tear into. I use the blindingly gold sheet as the bottom layer because you can see through tissue paper if you only use one layer.  And I think the gold is ugly, so this way it gets used without me having to look at it. Naturally my kids think it's the best paper we have.  (Hopefully they will grow out of this...)


Blogger Tip#2:
My all time favorite tip for wrapping comes from Emily (though I can't find her original post).  Emily has 6 kids.  Her youngest is Avery's age and her oldest is still in elementary school.  Needless to say, she needs a system, and she has a really fun one.  She wraps her gifts ahead of time like I do, but since more than half of her kids can read, she doesn't put tags on her gifts.  She chooses a different roll of wrapping paper for each kid and wraps all of their gifts in that one paper. This way her kids can't snoop!  When she stuffs their stockings Christmas Eve, she puts a square of each kid's wrapping paper in the bottom of their stocking so they know which presents belong to them.  And for those of you Crazies who take the time to wrap each of your Santa stocking presents, you could just use their wrapping paper on those presents too to tip them off though clever kids might put two and two together and well you know I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus and all that...but this isn't my problem because in my world, Santa is too busy making toys to wrap them too, but I'll talk more about this on Tuesday when I do my post for Day Nine: How We Do Santa.

Do you have any wrapping tips?