Tis the season....almost

I was perusing Meridith's blog today and came across this post of hers, which reminded me of a post I wrote last December. I got to thinking it is a good one to recycle this time of year and remind those of you who thought, "hey that is a good idea, I'll try it next year". Well, here it is ladies...next year. lol. I'd love to hear from you if you are going to try this method this year and then your results/review after Christmas as to how it went, how you liked it.
















It used to be that we would keep all the Christmas gifts for our children in our closet until Christmas Eve and then dear hubby and I would stay up late wrapping like crazy to get it all done AND still get a few hours sleep before the children woke up. That wasn't too bad of a system for our family when we had, say less than six children. Yet, as our family size grew, our closet stayed the same size. It became impossible to get into the closet to get to our clothes with all the gifts being "hidden" in there. With twelve children and even with trying to limit the amount of gifts, even 2-3 gifts times twelve is, well, too much for our closet to handle!

I think it was my smart hubby who came up with the solution we have been using for several years now: We wrap gifts as soon as we want, before or after the Christmas tree goes up, but instead of putting names on the gifts we use a number system. Wrap the first gift, slap a number "1" on it and on our master list that we keep hidden away till Christmas morning I write who number "1" goes to. And, so on till all the gifts are wrapped. This way, the gifts our out of our closet, are already wrapped (much less stress and more sleep Christmas Eve!) and the children do not know who's gift is who's so they are not tempted to try to "peek, shake or rattle" the gifts as they sit for weeks under the tree.

This year (edited to note: this was 2006), we put the tree up on December 4th and on the 6th hubby and I wrapped 26 gifts, which was the bulk of them, but a few more are still on the way from doing 90% of our Christmas shopping online this year (another life saver for the busy mom of twelve!).

This is also a good idea for families of any size who have kids who like to "peek", or compare how many gifts they each have under the tree ("sister has 5 and I only have 4 - waah!).

And no, we don't do Santa at our house, so there isn't any confusion as to why there are gifts under the tree before Christmas Eve.

Happy wrapping!

To give or not to give...and what to give, that is the question!

This post about Cheerful Fruglaity at Frugal Hacks was too good to not pass along, especially since we are already on the topic of Christmas gifts today.


Note to family members who read this blog: don't read the comment I left on the post Cheerful Frugality please. Don't want to spoil any surprises! LOL! No peeking!