Smart Wrapping Paper

Did you know that wrapping paper is a 3.2 billion dollar industry? With Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa around the corner millions of pounds of paper will be used to wrap gifts just once and then be piled up in trash cans that line every street around the world. Wasteful! I didn’t realize how much this bothered me until I had a dream about it.  When I woke up, I knew exactly what I needed to do.  This was kind of like my Eco-Xmas tree dream.  So here’s what I did:

I drove over to Fabrics R Us in San Jose to buy 20 yards of red and green satin.  Then I went to the Dollar Tree to buy 100 hair ties and scrunchies.  I added a few curtain rods to my Wrapping Room to hang all of the satin squares that I had cut in various sizes.  And voilà!  I was all set for a paperless Chistmas.

I grabbed a satin square and placed the gift item right in the center of it.  Then, I pulled all of the fabric up around the gift and tied it off – just like a girl’s pony tail.  With the extra fabric, I would pull it through another loop of the hair tie creating a beautiful “bow.”  It took 5 seconds to wrap!  No cutting wrapping paper, folding edges, taping ends, or adding ribbons.  The best part, after gifts were opened, we collected all of the satin sheets and then tossed them over the curtain rod for the next holiday.  We even put all of the hair ties in a Xmas box to be reused again.