Best Results Organizing

Welcome to the home stretch of the holiday season.

Maybe you’re reading this while standing in a long line because this is the first chance you’ve had to shop and you were shocked to find that your favorite online store sold out of the only thing on your special person’s list.

Perhaps you bought all your presents last summer, wrapped and labeled them, and stored them in your secret hiding place months ago.

Either way, how are you going to keep the gifts a surprise until unwrapping time?

HIDING PLACES

I think the best place to keep gifts, wrapped or otherwise, from the prying eyes of tiny humans and others with insatiable curiosity is in an old suitcase. People will check under beds and in closets, but nobody looks in those cheerless valises in the basement, the ones that are faux leather and lack wheels and haven’t been used in 40+ years.

Yes, as a professional organizer, I encourage people to donate or recycle things that they don’t use, but quietly repurposing that blue suitcase circa 1978 counts as recycling!

Other options worth considering:

• Hidden in plain site — Would your kids (or your spouse) show any interest in prying up the lid of a Bankers Box labeled “2015 Tax Receipts,” “college textbooks,” or something similarly boring? Probably not. (Piling other stuff on top couldn’t hurt.) If you’re the only one in your house who cooks, a small wrapped gift or two hidden in the back of a kitchen cabinet, inside a rarely-used fondue pot, may be just what you need to stymie the sneaky searchers.
• Your friends’ & neighbors’ houses — One solution is just to trade storage. Take your wrapped gifts in boxes or lidded tubs to your cousin’s, co-worker’s, or BFF’s place, and return with hers. You can even tell your family not to bother snooping because you’ve made this trade. (Note: if your kids and their kids are friends, one may spy on the other’s behalf.)
• The trunk of your car — Obviously, this works in only two situations, when you normally have an incredibly tidy trunk (with ample room to store a gift-filled box labeled “work project”) or if you normally have a predictably packed and untidy trunk (in which case you need to hollow it out and hide gifts underneath the faux facade of mess. (Do not mark any boxes as “donations” or someone may unhelpfully deliver all your holiday gifts to charity!)
• Attics — The upside is that children and pets generally can’t get up to the attic on their own. The downside? It’s probably not that easy for you to get up there, either. Also, it’s probably dusty, there may be “critters” and there’s almost certainly temperature and humidity variations throughout the year. Keep that in mind if you’re storing any gifts that are sensitive to those kinds of changes, and store the gifts in a tightly lidded tub.
• Laundry hamper — Let’s face it; nobody is enthusiastic about doing laundry. Your kids aren’t about to suddenly volunteer to take the laundry from your room, even to please Santa. 
• Trash bags — Big, black trash bags or leaf bags, especially if you have an attic, or garage, or basement with a variety of things already obscured by bags, may be the ticket. The problem? If there’s anyone who ever visits your house trying to be “helpful,” they may assume it’s trash and toss it out.

If your storage is at a premium and you have to keep wrapped gifts out and on display — and this trick works once you’re ready to put the gifts under the tree — fake the name tags. Instead of Mom, Dad, Aunt Jen, etc., make yourself a cheat sheet matching real names to “gift” names and put presents out for Lizzo, Daenerys, Baby Yoda, and so on.

WRAPPING SAVVY

Paper Doll is terrible at wrapping any gifts that don’t come in perfectly rectangular shapes. Back in NAPO2014: It’s a Wrap! Organizing Your Wrapping Supplies with Wrap It!, I told a story of my wrapping failures (and shared this adorable photo of a now-late-20s young man).

Many years ago, I offered up some alternatives for people with wrapping skill deficits:

It’s a Wrap! Wrapping Paper Alternatives, Furoshiki & Frogs (2008)

Paper Doll Wraps Up the Holidays and Makes It All Stick (Part 1) (2011)

Paper Doll Wraps Up Some Alternatives to Wrapping Paper (Part 2) (2011)

I’m obviously not the only person who has trouble wrapping presents, because the hottest video on the internet in the past few weeks has been one that went viral with ways to wrap gifts in unusual ways, and especially spotlighting wrapping gifts diagonally.

In case you haven’t seen it, be sure to press PLAY below and crank the volume. Oh, and stop by @BlossomHacks to give them some love. As often happens on the internet, credit got lost along the way, and most people were not aware that Blossom DIY created the video (which UK bookseller Waterstones made viral).

Wrapping gifts got a whole lot easier with these clever ideas! pic.twitter.com/sP4MXhpBBu

— Blossom (@BlossomHacks) December 14, 2019

By the way, if you care, Popular Mechanics has a feature on the math behind the diagonal wrapping hack. 

WRAPPING and PACKING and SHIPPING, OH MY!

Finally, I’m an organizing and productivity expert, not a wrapping, packing, and shipping expert (my recent post, This “Magic” Product Makes Shipping Packages as Easy as Wrapping Leftovers, notwithstanding).

Luckily, our friends at Quill have more expertise on these issues and have been kind enough to share their infographic to take you through each of these holiday headaches with aplomb.

Gift wrapping, packing, and shipping hacks to save money and make your life easierInfographic by Quill

A FINAL WORD

Of course, the best gifts don’t necessarily need to be wrapped or shipped. As we’ve talked about many times, gifts don’t need to be things at all.

We’ve spoken many times about how you can give gifts of experiences. Consider adventures (like the NASCAR Racing Experience or an afternoon in an escape room), entertainment (tickets to sporting events, museum exhibits, concerts, theater events, six months of Netflix or Hulu, or a year of Amazon Prime), practicality (gift certificates for car washes or an auto club membership like AAA), or consumables (homemade or subscription-based, or gift certificates to restaurants or coffee houses). And, of course, gifts of organization and productivity never go amiss.

Happy holidays, and I hope whatever you give (and receive) gifts makes life a little (or a lot) more joyous.