Holiday Odds and Ends

With less than 48 hours to Christmas morning, life is proceeding at a frenzied pace at our home. We are now unburied from the snowstorm and mobile and able to complete our holiday errands. Apparently everyone else in the area has the same idea and I am hearing reports of crowds and parking hassles at every major shopping center. Good news for retailers and the economy, though! Also, in my last post, I questioned whether delivery services would be delayed due to the storm. I am shocked to report that the U.S. Postal Service in our area never missed a day of delivery! Somehow we received mail on both Saturday and Monday. Incredible!

Today, I have a few odds and ends to post about holiday preparations.

Holiday cards
Yesterday, I spent 9.5 hours getting our holiday cards ready. I try to streamline the process by keeping all of my names and addresses in an Excel spreadsheet. Throughout the year, whenever someone tells me they have moved, the first place I update is the holiday card list and note the date that the update was received. The list is useful for birthday and other invitations throughout the year as well.

There is still some time involved, however, to mail merge the list onto labels and update some addresses. The Washington Post wrote an interesting article about the decline in holiday cards this year. I was most interested in this vignette suggesting that social networking sites like Facebook are intruding on the practice of holiday cards:

“. . . Charbonneau reluctantly swapped a holiday greetings model dating back to the 1800s for this four-sentence posting on Facebook: ‘Dear Everyone, Please consider this your holiday card for the year. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Blessed Yule, and so on. Sorry to be a lame friend but, really, I’m just not Superwoman. I admit defeat on holiday cards.’ . . . ‘I like this card . . . consider yours this reply,’ responded one, closing the yearly greetings loop in eight words and about 10 seconds.”

-Steve Hendrix, “Fewer People Are Sending Holiday Cards Via Snail Mail in 2009,” The Washington Post

This year, my holiday card process took extra long because I ended up writing many long overdue thank you notes to include with the cards. I am glad to go into the Christmas season caught up on the thank you notes as there are many more to come soon. While I am still searching for a good solution to streamline my thank you note writing process, this free Thank You Note tracker printable from Family Fun has at least given me a place to consolidate all the thank yous to be written in a single place.

Wrapping Paper
I am one of those tactile people who has always enjoyed wrapping presents. I like getting out the big rolls of paper, putting on the tape and finishing it all off with a ribbon and gift tag. I also like hints for unique wrapping ideas, like this “rip cord” wrapping paper technique that allows for quick opening.

This year, I saw this suggestion from Martha Stewart for a “gift wrapping station.” While I think this looks beautiful, I know it is not practical for our home as we don’t have a space like this and my husband feels that it is just an invitation for little hands to pull the paper and ribbons off the spools. As I was thinking about why I liked the “gift wrapping station,” I realized that it was not about the station itself but the simplicity it contained. Notice that there is only one all-purpose roll of wrapping paper in the station. The four types of ribbon give enough options for different types of presents (birthday, holiday, housewarming, etc.).

My frugal and simple version of the gift wrapping station was to take the wrapping paper I already have and turn it inside out so that the printed side of the paper faced inward and the outside was white. I put on a festive holiday ribbon and the presents looked great! We will see if the recipients realize that the inside of their Christmas presents say “Happy Birthday.” (Of course, if you purchase the perfectionist wrapping paper with the grid marks on the back, you might not be able to use this hint—although grid marks might make for a neat “plaid” effect.)

Wrapping paper is not very environmentally friendly and I was also thinking about options to throwing away a huge garbage sack full of papers. My first thought was to find “wrapping paper” that could be recycled, like a wide roll of plain newsprint or white office paper. I have not yet found a source like this. I also found ideas (again from Martha Stewart) for re-using materials such as children’s artwork, shopping bags, paper towels, old phone books and old calendar pages. The most unique idea I found, however, was to borrow a Japanese tradition and wrap and tie the gifts in fabric, furoshiki style.  I will keep these ideas in mind for next year.

Christmas tree
Our artificial tree is now out of the basement and assembled but still awaiting ornaments. We discovered to our horror that the entire tree smelled of dead mouse! Fortunately, there was no mouse to be found and after airing our for a few days and with the help of a pine-floral air freshener (still looking for a true pine scented fragrance) the stench is gone.

While our tree is going up later than most, I was heartened to read this description in the book “Christmas in Colonial and Early America,”

“Christmas Eve was probably the busiest night of the year in most American homes [in the 1870’s]. There was the last-minute wrapping of packages to be done, and rushing a belated Christmas card across town to that old friend who had somehow been forgotten until his card arrived late in the afternoon. Many of the house decorations, too, waited until the eleventh hour because there was an old belief that some Christmas greenery would bring misfortune to the family if brought into the house before Christmas Eve.”

–World Book, Christmas in Colonial and Early America

Once the tree was up, however, my little ones knew it was Christmas and that is priceless. They are busy decorating and undecorating the tree. We have ornaments strewn all over the house now.

In light of the Christmas holiday, this will be my last post for the week. I will be back again on Monday. To those who celebrate, wishing you a very Merry Christmas!

How are your holiday preparations coming along? Please post in the comments.