If you have more than one kid, you’ve probably experienced gift comparison. So and so has more presents under the tree than me, etc. You may even have dealt with one or more of your children trying to peek or shake or squish a present to try to figure out what they are getting. I know I have. It almost seemed unavoidable. Until I figured out how to avoid it.
A couple years ago, my sister decided to use reusable wrapping paper. She was a seamstress so she made bags or wrappings that she could reuse year after year and each kiddo got a different fabric so they knew which presents belonged to which kid just by looking at the fabric wrapping.
I am not a seamstress. I knit and crochet and am so much not a seamstress that just sewing in the ends of the yarn annoys me. So I wasn’t about to sew reusable Christmas wrappings and knitting them was out of the question as well, but her idea did give me an idea that I felt like I could use that would change how we did gifts.
That year, I decided to wrap each kid’s presents in a different wrapping paper and not label any of them. I put a tiny square of their wrapping paper in the bottom of their stocking. On Christmas Day, after we read the story of Jesus’ birth in the Bible, the kids get their stockings first and then they get to discover which wrapping paper is theirs. But until then, I don’t see my kids shaking or squishing packages or trying to peek because they have no idea which presents are theirs.
This year, we took it a step farther. My 7 and 10 year olds were both getting stick horses and those came in big boxes so I wrapped all the other presents for them and shoved them into the box with the unwrapped stick horse. Then I wrapped the box. I also found a large box for my 13 year old and my 8 year old to wrap all their presents in. By the time we wrapped all the presents, we didn’t have enough paper left for the big box so on a couple we did a patch job and put the side with their paper toward the wall or we used a different paper for the big box.
When the kids opened their stockings this year, they were a little confused so we let them try to figure it out for a few minutes and then we helped them find their boxes.
This was also the first year that the kids decided to do their own Secret Santa. They chose names and made something for a sister, which snowballed into them making one or more things for all their sisters and then me and their dad and their aunt. It kept them occupied in the days out of school leading up to Christmas, they were focused on giving and they were excited about it, so it was all good in my book.
When it came time to open presents, though, they had to give out the gifts they were giving before they could open the gifts they were receiving. This not only put an emphasis on giving before receiving, it also resulted in my kids finishing giving at different times so instead of each opening one present then each opening another until they were done, they got to open all their presents at once so while they were opening, they were focused on their gifts, not anyone else’s. They weren’t counting how many gifts each person got. They were just opening and oohing and ahhing over the gifts they received.
We’ve been using a variation of this system for a couple years now and have had some great results. I’ll probably change it a little again next year, to keep them on their toes, but I fully intend on using some variation of this system for the foreseeable future. It works for us.
I hope you all had a very merry Christmas and if you have a gift wrapping system that you’d like to share, I would love to hear all about it in the comments.
Made from Scratch 