14 Days of Festivity: Day 14

Wrapping It Up

I spent Thursday (14 days of Festivity: Day 14) and Friday (Unofficial Festive Day 15) wrapping all the gifts in my possession, which was maybe about a third of the gifts we were giving.  (Another third will be transported in Bill's suitcase, and airport security dictates that gifts not be wrapped. The final third of the gifts were ordered online and shipped directly out to my mom's house in California.) 

Let me start with what I feel is my most exciting wrapping.  I got the idea to make boxes out of board game boards from a Pinterest pin that Melisa pinned recently.  It was the perfect idea to wrap the gift for the "green elephant" exchange my mom/stepdad's family is having.  Green elephant is sort of like white elephant, in that you bring something that you already have, but there's less emphasis on giving something hilariously tacky.  Also you are encouraged to wrap the gift in an eco-friendly way. 

I figured that since my husband has tons of board games, he could possibly part with one old one to be recycled into a gift box.  I was incorrect in that assumption, and he sent me over to the Salvation Army to purchase used board games specifically to be cut up for the box-making project.  So when I went to the Salvation Army to drop off some of Nathan's old toys, I then parked and went into the store to acquire more stuff. 

Luckily they had the original Trivial Pursuit, which I should point out that we also own, along with several other updated editions that I find more enjoyable to play than the version with questions from 1983, but which Bill insists upon keeping because apparently someday there will be some situation where we're all just sitting around dying to play a 30-year-old trivia game. 

I also got a backgammon game, which is pleasantly 70s retro. 

Then I found what I really wanted: Old-school Candy Land.  The set had a board and five cards, and no game pieces for the players to march around the board.  But I just wanted the board, so I was happy to pay $1.00 for it.  Which just goes to show you, no matter what crap you're donating to charity, there's always somebody who wants it.  But usually that somebody isn't me. 

I put my green elephant gift in a box made of Candy Land, then made gift boxes for specific people's gifts out of Trivial Pursuit and backgammon:

I wrapped our second green elephant gift in a paper grocery bag, which I embellished with a strip of scrapbook paper and a felt decoration reused from a box of chocolates:

The third green elephant wrapping was another Pinterest find, a gift bag made from a newspaper.  I made a tag out of a cut-up Christmas card from Trainer Jill, which is two kittens in a Santa hat, but sort of looks more like a chicken drumstick:

So I wrapped those and a bunch of other packages, and I packed them all up to ship to California in advance of my visit.  Let's keep in mind this was a third of the gifts we purchased, and this was in a year where we made concerted efforts to cut back.  How does this happen? 

Also, orange Duck-brand duct tape is the best.