With holiday season upon us, I always find it extremely useful to have my home prepared ahead of time for something that everyone loves to say they enjoy but deep down hates to do more than once: wrapping gifts.
In fact, I’ve come across a decent amount of people close to me who say they enjoy wrapping gifts, but every time I see their gift wrapping, it ends up being shoddy. I mean, no wonder they love to “wrap gifts”. It looks like they had a six pack of some holiday cheer and then got around to wrapping them and calling it done within a few minutes. This isn’t gift wrapping and it’s certainly not enjoying the actual process. It’s more of an approach that says “How quickly can I get done with this thing that I don’t like?”
If more people admitted they weren’t fans of wrapping gifts, I think we’d have better wrapped gifts simply because everyone would be honest with themselves.
Anyway, back to my original point: it’s important to be prepared and well stocked for the materials and packaging supplies you’ll need. The more prepared you are, the better your wrapping will be (and that’s primarily because you took it seriously enough to prepare beforehand!). It’s quite common sense to take your time, put some effort in, and realize it’s all part of the process we call holidays. To receive a few gifts, well, you’ll need to give a few (which includes wrapping!).
With that said, it’s important that you’re not just getting crappy tape that cost you a dollar and slapping that on some bland wrapping paper. When it comes to packaging supplies, quality pays off in dividends simply because you’re not overusing your tape, you’re not constantly ripping cheap wrapping paper, and you’re not spending extra time wrapping when you never needed to spend that much time in the first place.
I understand not everyone likes to wrap gifts, and that’s where the gift bag comes in. But throwing something in a brightly colored bag and tossing tissue paper on top does holiday gifts an injustice. At the very least, go with a brown paper bag, label it nicely, and throw in some festive tissue paper and twine. If you’re gonna shirk the wrapping, at least make the bag look nice!
Celebrating the holidays doesn’t have to be hard. But if you overthink it and try to find shortcuts, you’ll make it harder than it ever needed to be.
