Gifts and Giving: Getting Creative with Gift Wrapping

I love gift wrapping. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the excitement of the anticipation of what's to come, or maybe it's just another thing that allows me to be creative and have fun. Sometimes the gift wrap is left plain and sometimes I embellish with ribbons, bows, homemade tags, or whatever interesting tickles my fancy.

Last year at Christmas, I added a variety of scrapbooking embellishments to my gifts from lettering to snowflakes. It's fun, and it's a good way to use up extras and leftovers from your crafting supplies or reusuables that become craft supplies.

A friend of mine is also very creative and whenever I receive a gift from her it's usually in a recycled container or wrapping, and there is always something extra attached to the package. The extra may be a dried flower, or a little jingle bell - simple little touches that make the parcel all that more special to receive.

Certain items have always presented a challenge to wrap and have required some ingenuity on the gift giver. Lately, the trend to reuse and recycle seems to have more and more people thinking about ways to cut back on paper waste.

Below is an article originally published on Helium in November 2009 to address alternative ideas for presenting holiday and other gifts.

Creative Gift Wrapping Ideas

Wrapping gifts is, for many people, a labor of love. Finding the right paper, trims and tags, and gussying up your carefully selected presents can be just as exciting as watching your friends and loved ones opening them. Keeping a ready supply of gift wrap on hand can get expensive, but there are number of creative ways to wrap gifts with materials you already have at home.

Reusable tins and canisters are great for holding a lot more than just holiday cookies and candy. Clean them carefully, dry thoroughly and then paint them with spray enamel to use in place of paper-based gift boxes. You can further decorate them by using stencils to create a design on the surface. Another way to decorate them for holding gifts is to use decoupage.

Small items such as earrings can be placed inside little origami boxes made from recycled paper. There are a variety of styles of origami boxes in different shapes from the basic square to triangles, hearts and stars. Choose one that is best suited for your gift. Large grocery bags and heavy weight magazine pages such as the ones used for perfume samples and old greeting cards are well suited for origami boxes.

Paper grocery bags can also be opened and used for wrapping gifts. Use rubber stamps, stencils or stickers to create decorative patterns suitable to the occasion to create unique wrapping paper. Turn leftover lunch sacks turned into gift bags by adding handles from ribbon or pipe cleaners and decorative trim. Alternatively, in place of handles, fold the top of the lunch sack down two to three inches against one side of the bag. Use a single-hole punch to place to holes through all layers of the paper flap one inch from the top edges and thread ribbon or yarn through the holes and tie to make a closure.

Old clothing can easily be recycled into reusable gift bags and pouches. Unused, headscarves, handkerchiefs, tea towels and table linens are also suitable for wrapping gifts. Use an envelope or simple clutch purse pattern as a guide for your fabric pouch. You can also use a paper lunch sack as a template to create a pattern for a reusable gift sack. Longer pieces of recycled fabric can be used to create unique ribbons and flowers for embellishing wrapped gifts. Create ribbon by folding a long cloth strip around fusible web and ironing.

Newspaper makes great gift wrap. It's practical and eco-friendly and, since most people have a ready supply on hand, it's convenient and cheap. For a personal touch, use the Sunday comics when wrapping gifts for kids, the fashion section for teens and the sports pages for budding athletes. Use ribbons, lace, buttons, costume jewelry or strips of paper to embellish the news wrapped gifts. Patterned stationery is another great stand in for store bought wrapping paper and is ideal for wrapping small boxes.

With a little thought and rummaging around you can find all sorts of materials around the house that are suitable for wrapping gifts. Your packages will have their own unique style and friends and family members will praise your creative ingenuity.

Family Genealogy Activities for Thanksgiving

Holidays are the one time of year where families are almost certainly guaranteed to get together as a group under one roof. Busy schedules, distance, and a variety of miscellaneous obligations that normally interfere in
the success of gatherings, are less of an issue when the entire country gets time off for food, football and all around family fun.

Thanksgiving, perhaps above all other holidays, presents an unique opportunity for both learning and teaching moments, and for the documenting of family history. The following article, originally published in November of 2011 via Helium, highlights genealogy activities families can undertake to record, celebrate and preserve their heritage.

Genealogy Activities for Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a great time to engage in genealogy activities. With multiple generations of family members gathered in one location, the holiday gives younger relatives an opportunity to collect stories from older ones, as well as additional information from extended family members who are on hand especially for the occasion.

In general, compiling information on family origins begins with birth and death records. Gathering these could mean a trip to a county office, local library (dates only), or sending off for the information through the mail. When starting out though, interviewing family members is the most basic and reliable genealogy activity there is. There are a number of forms designed for gathering information that can help to organize the mounds of data that accumulates during family fact finding, such as those found at Familytreemagazine.com.

Getting children involved in genealogy activities early helps to ensure there will continue to be family historians archiving and collecting information for generations to come. A simple genealogy activity for Thanksgiving that kids can do is to fill out Scholastic’s family tree worksheet. The free printable, available in .pdf form, allows kids to enter their own names as well as those of their parents, siblings, grandparents and great grandparents.

Collecting oral histories from older family members is a genealogy activity that provides insight into the lives of previous generations as well as specific information on individual family members. Kids can interview older family members about their childhood, educational experiences, professions, and/or the major events of their lives and look at how their relatives’ experiences are similar or different from their own. Capturing these interviews via audio or video recording is a good way to preserve them, and kids can use the footage to create their own family documentary after the holiday.

Scrapbooking is another great genealogy activity for Thanksgiving. Page layouts can encompass anything from individual family member histories to accounts of various activities from the holiday. Plan ahead by asking family members to bring copies of photos to share, or if possible, use a digital camera and photo printer to scrap memories as they are created. Ask family members to create journal entries such as “I remember,” or “when I was a kid,” that can be included in the scrapbook. Alternatively, or additionally, allow family members to create their own mini scrapbooks to take home at the end of the day.

Genealogy activities for Thanksgiving are a great opportunity for family bonding. They provide a window into the past while reinforcing the connections of the present. Involving multiple family members in the activities keeps the burden of maintaining the family’s history – a huge task—off just one person.