Wrapping paper is expensive and much of it is pretty ugly. Further, you don’t typically get much paper per roll, so you’re also faced with wasting a great deal of packaging. While all those cardboard tubes are one of “The 6 Best Toys of All Time,” they’re just more stuff to have to recycle. Further, in our household, our tree doesn’t go up (and packages don’t go under the tree) until days before the big day, if not late Christmas Eve, so fancy paper is just wasted in terms of something that is viewed.
What we’ve done in this household for the past few years is wrap all presents all year round in kraft paper. It took us a couple tries to get the right paper weight. One roll we had was too think and didn’t fold well, and some packing paper we had on-hand ripped too easily. We’ve settled on this 30-inch by 765-foot roll from Amazon. It fits the bill perfectly. and at $29.75. it’s an enormous savings over other paper available on Amazon. The cheapest option found just now was $168.50 for the same square footage of paper, and most other papers were hitting in the many hundreds of dollars for the same square footage!
When we used to live the lie, we would wrap packages from the jolly fellow in a colored paper, but that would only take a couple rolls of the expensive stuff. If the beautiful natural brown color is too plain for you, you can spice it up with ribbons, bows, string, yarn, or the like… or maybe let your kids do some drawing and coloring! We tend to go with a name scrawled in Sharpie and call it good. I actually like the pile of nice plain brown boxes. It’s calming in an otherwise typically hectic time.
The kraft paper roll is pretty unwieldy when at its original full size, so you may want this paper cutter/dispenser to go with it. (Confirm the roll and cutter size before ordering!) I’d only recommend that if you had a fixed location for it though.
There are certainly more environmentally friendly options, such as reusing newspaper (though I find it hard to wrap presents in my electronic news-reading device). What tricks do you use to get through the chores and hidden costs of wrapping presents?
I don’t mind wrapping presents, in fact I’ve been known to wrap each die in a set individually. We usually wait till late in the season / after Christmas and pick up rolls on clearance. Also staying away form licensed paper as well keeps the cost down. But I do like the craft paper idea. If you have a teacher supply store in the area the rolls that they use to cover cork boards work great too.
Yes, buying after Christmas is smart, as is teacher supply, large rolls of kraft paper… then you have color options too.
If you don’t need that large roll, Dollar Tree sells a decent sized roll that is probably 10 times bigger than their wrapping paper rolls.