All Wrapped Up.

My friend over at http://www.travelinoma.blogspot.com/ has a post today about Christmas.  She has asked her readers to answer some questions about Christmas magic, traditions, how to deal with the "is Santa Claus real" question and a few others.  I could post a comment directly on her blog.  But since my response will probably be kind of long, I'm posting it here and will link from her blog.

One of her questions was "What is the most stressful thing about Christmas?".  That got me thinking.  When I had little kids at home the most stressful thing was getting all the presents wrapped.  For me, this project usually waited until Christmas Eve which meant that the process didn't start until all the Christmas Eve activities were over and the kids were in bed and asleep.  The task of wrapping Christmas presents didn't start until well after 11 PM, if I was lucky.

One year, as my husband and I were wrapping Christmas presents, adding bows and name tags to each gift for our five kids, I said to him, "There's got to be a better way.". This comment probably came on a year when we had hosted the Christmas Eve dinner for his entire family.  I was already spent and still had the present wrapping to deal with.  It was probably more than 20 years ago.  But I clearly remember sitting on the floor in our family room surrounded by presents, wrapping paper, bows and gift tags, exhausted and not too happy that I still had this chore to tackle.

Well, it's said that necessity is the mother of invention.  So I came up with a better way.  The next year, the first thing I bought was wrapping paper.  I had decided that each child would have their own wrapping paper - like color coding.  I had my own guidelines as to what the wrapping paper should look like.  It had to be primarily green or red, and the theme of the paper had to relate to something about the child.  I had fun going through all the wrapping paper selections at my favorite store, thinking about each child as I selected a pattern.  

With the wrapping paper on hand, the next process was easy.  I wrapped the presents as I brought them in the house.  I could do this during the day because most of the kids were in school.  Then I would put the wrapped packages in my Christmas hiding place.  I figured if the kids found them, which I was told later that they often did, all they would find were wrapped presents.  After a few years of wrapping paper coding their presents, they told me that if they found the gifts, it was fun for them to try and guess which wrapping paper held their presents.

Color coding the presents solved a couple of other stress inducers....no need for gift tags and when it came time for my husband to set out the presents from Santa, all I had to do was tell him which wrapping paper was for which kid.  Next year, the left over wrapping paper was used for gifts going out of the house.

This may not be an original idea.   But for me, it was certainly an "a ha moment" that made a big difference with my stress level at Christmas.