Christmas is coming up quick, and I know there are plenty of you out there that haven’t even begun to wrap your presents. I remember that almost every year when I was young, my mom would stay up until 2 or 3am (or later) to finish wrapping the gifts (my dad would always make sure we didn’t wake her up too early on Christmas morning!), but once I got older, I loved to help her wrap presents. There’s something about making a nice, neat, perfect-looking gift that is almost as satisfying as unwrapping one. Scott and I don’t have a lot of space or storage in our apartment this year, and we also don’t have a lot of money to spend on all kinds of wrapping paper and bits – enter kraft paper. We bought a huge roll on Amazon and have been using it for EVERYTHING. I love how cohesive it makes the presents look, but I do like to be a little creative with the packages. I’ve come up with some ways to dress up plain old kraft packages so they’ll look special under the tree!

For this gift, I simply wrote the name across the package, then added a few stars with gold paint pen. I love the way the gold paint pen looks, and I think it would also look good with just the name (especially on a big gift!).

Try using a thick ribbon for a large package. For this one, I didn’t even run the ribbon the whole way across the bottom, just enough to go across the top and down the sides (so you can save your ribbon and your money)!

Draw some simple Christmas trees and/or holly with a permanent marker. I used both for a natural holiday motif, but I also love the idea of drawing just holly or just a line of trees across the bottom of the gift!

Cut a tag out of cardstock or construction paper, address it, and stick it to the package. I like this because it’s simple, but it would be really easy to make the tag fancier.

For this one, I wrapped baker’s twine around the gift a few times, tied it in a small bow, then tucked a small sprig under the twine (in case you were wondering, this is from a fraser fir tree – Scott’s uncle owns a Christmas tree farm, so I’ve been learning things like this since being married).

This is definitely one of my favorite ideas – I just tied a simple white ribbon across the package. I think it looks so beautiful, and a whole bunch of presents wrapped in this way would look amazing under the tree.

One last thing – if you’re going for a very cohesive look, I would suggest only incorporating one or two of these ideas (for example, most of my gifts have pretty lettering in either gold or black, and a few gifts have bakers twine). Hope these ideas were helpful – here’s to spending less time wrapping and more time with families and friends!