Unwrapped

I love buying gifts but not so much wrapping them. I would love to wrap each gift like a little jewel but I just get tired at the immense mound of them and end up throwing most of them in bags with tissue paper.
I did wrap some of them in paper and tied them with ribbon but not very many of them. I know the bags are good for recycling and we even reuse the tissue paper if we can. Remember back in the day when our moms used to keep the wrapping paper and use it for drawer liners?? I can still see my mom carefully folding paper because it "was too pretty to throw away." She really wanted to line drawers!
I haven't lined my drawers since the 70's. I remember I bought special blue paper to match my bedroom for the drawers in there. Can you imagine?? How funny is that?
Ribbon used to be a lot different too. My aunt always used that curling ribbon and she could make it do all kinds of fancy stuff. I never did figure out how she did it. My mother always used the stick on bows once they became available. I guess she never got the hang of it either.
Because of recycling bags, I have enough Christmas wrap to last about 15 years or so. No little odds and ends either. Whole rolls--some never even opened.
I hope the parents of little kids still wrap. You know there is nothing like ripping into those gifts whether you are the kid or the parent. It is equally thrilling and fun. I can still see my kids when they were little pulling the paper off and sometimes the paper would be so big you could wrap them in it!! You know how some of those toddler presents come in enormous boxes.
I didn't even wrap the gifts for the kids I donated to at church. I just put everything wrapped in tissue into a huge bag. For the 13 year old girl I put all the cute clothes on top. For the five year old boy, I put all the cute clothes on the bottom. Smart, right?? What five year old wants clothes?? Well, beside my daughter. I figure by the time he gets to the clothes he will be so busy with the toys his mom will have to take the clothes out of the bag and hopefully she will be as excited as he is!
We still do stockings in our family even thought there aren't any little kids at the present time. My two adult children come and sit on our bed with us and we take turns opening and oohing and aahing about the contents.
I still have a ton of gifts to wrap so I better get going. I love to pile them all under the tree until the big day. Nobody snoops any more....at least, I don't think so!