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12/23/2020 0 Comments The Wrapping Paper DilemmaEvery year I have a love/hate relationship with wrapping presents. We procrastinate and my husband seems to slink away every time it's “wrapping time”. Most times I end up staying up way too late and wrapping presents in a dark quiet house...by that point it’s quite zen. I have always felt that making and creating is a great way to quell anxiety, and anxiety is abundant in a normal holiday season, let alone this year… I usually try to go an eco friendly wrapping route since wrapping paper cannot be recycled (yikes). We usually do either brown paper bags that we have accumulated throughout the year or reusable bags. But this year I decided to do something a bit different. Ruby goes to a WONDERFUL little preschool and they send her home with copious amounts of artwork. We love our little artist’s masterpieces, but you really can’t keep them all...especially if they are quite large in size. I started thinking about what we could do with all of her paintings. I approached Ruby and asked her if we could turn her artwork into something REALLY special. So this year, our wrapping paper is unique, one of a kind work. Determined to not wait until the very last minute this year we started wrapping earlier. We found that we ran out of Ruby’s paper so we got the cousins together (we are all covid tested and quarantined together) and we made more. It was a magical bonding experience that had 4 of the 5 kids engaged ( ages 2.5-8 years old). We then made watercolor tags to go along with our homemade paper. I loved having all my little elves working with me, and it really reminded me of my years teaching in the classroom. When it came time to wrap, my husband begrudgingly helped me wrap the gifts and I think he even might have enjoyed it a little. We topped them off with the dried oranges and ornaments from our earlier crafts (read about that in this blog post.) I love how they turned out, in all of their quirkiness. Although this year our paper cannot be recycled-painted paper can negatively affect the quality of the other recycled paper... We were able to give our kid’s artwork a second life, because we all know many art pieces from preschool end up in the garbage can ( I promise I save some of it!!) We also created memories by turning it into an activity for the cousins. I imagine that our gift recipients will enjoy the paper and it hopefully will spark joy for them in an otherwise weird holiday season.
Happy Holidays
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