The Eleventh Blog Of Christmas Is About Wrapping Gifts

It’s all winding down now the only thing left is the crying, wait no I mean wrapping. The one thing about a large Christmas is wrapping all the presents. I realized last year I left my paper at my Mom’s so this year I had to totally replenish my supply so I ended up spending fifty dollars on wrapping paper. That’s a crazy amount of money for some paper that will be nothing but tatters and trash in a couple day’s. This year I tried to be environmentally correct and socially conscious in my paper selection (crazy I know) I purchased only recycled papers and a couple Breast cancer awareness rolls also. I might as well start wrapping my gifts in cash considering what it costs for these rolls of future garbage these days.

Does anyone really have any idea the amount of hours that goes into wrapping gifts? I do, it’s my most dreaded part of the holiday, I spend a good five hours total maybe more just wrapping presents, its insane and tedious. And its not just the gifts, our family has a tradition called grab bag, my grandmother started this long before I was born and we have continued it now that she’s gone. Its pretty simple really each person goes to dollar stores or discount stores and buys about twenty to thirty silly,dumb or possibly useful items, you wrap them all and on Christmas Eve they are all thrown into a pile. Next we draw numbers like 1-10 depending on the amount of people you can repeat the numbers so you’d have 2 ones for instance, then someone calls numbers like “ones go ahead”, and they go pick a present and then twos and so on. From here its kind of a free for all, once everyone has a gift you can trade someone else sight unseen or open and keep it, or trade someone for something you want. Sometimes if someone has an item you really want you will have to come up with several gifts to trade for it and this routine goes on until all the gifts are gone and everyone is done trading.

So along with all my usual gifts I have three bags full of grab bag junk to wrap! My boyfriend had a pretty good idea he got brown paper lunch sacks and just taped the top shut, not a bad idea I may do that for some of the smaller stuff, anything to save a little time. I have one other time consuming project this year, as I may have mentioned my daughter is eight and kids at school have started telling her there is no Santa Clause, I think eight is way to young to start losing our ideals about more innocent things. She still believes but she is starting to question certain things and she is older and more observant so i bought special Santa paper, my son thinks this is really funny, but I bought a special set of paper with ribbons tags and bows that all match and hid them and I am only using them for her “Santa” gifts. Yep I’m crazy, no doubt about it now is there?

Really it just goes to prove a point, kind of the central nexus for this whole 12 Blogs of Christmas is that in our family this is a very special time, we go to any measure to make it wonderful and memorable for those around us and I hope that the people I have had in my life and even those that read this may get something out of it, a new tradition,a new closeness, maybe only a new recipe but something that I am handing down from my life.