Have you started wrapping gifts yet? Have you even bought them yet?
This year, we will be quietly at home, with minimal gift exchanges, but over the last decade or so I have tried several methods of reducing the waste involved while still adding attractive-looking parcels to the piles under the tree.
For example:
- I bought scraps of red and green fabric from the store, so people could save and reuse it. Sticky tape didn't work so well, so I needed ribbons to tie the parcels, but it worked.
- My mother has a broadsheet newspaper delivered everyday, so I used that to wrap my gifts. I don't know if the recipients noticed but I had a lot of fun choosing pages that matched their personality or what I was giving them. In the run up to the holidays there were so many adverts and special features that it was almost impossible to find plain black and white text pages. My mother has a drawer full of ribbon she inherited from her mother, so I used some of that. I got numerous surprised comments about how good they looked, although an equal number of weird looks.
However, this article by Alden Wicker is full of much more creative ideas than I ever thought of, and she explains the idea so well:
"Gift wrapping gives us the same challenge as dressing fashionably. It’s a means of expressing ourselves, and in this case, our love and care for other people. You want it to look sophisticated and beautiful, just without all the waste, exploitation, and environmental impact."
Exactly!
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