Best Results Organizing

With only a week until Hanukkah and 2-1/2 weeks until Christmas, we’re in the home stretch of the holiday season.

It’s possible you’re the kind of person who bought all your presents over the summer, wrapped and labeled them, and stored them in your secret hiding place months ago. (It’s also possible now you’re wondering why you can’t recall where that secret hiding place might be.)

Or maybe you haven’t even started buying gifts yet.

Either way, how are you going to keep the gifts a surprise until unwrapping time? How are you going to keep the kids (and the grownups who act like kids) from finding the gifts, poking at them, shaking them, and generally behaving like the gang on Friends.

 
ORGANIZE YOUR HOLIDAY GIFT HIDING PLACES

Very often, I find that 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 may in cabinets and 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 vinyl-and-cardboard suitcase circa 1978 counts as recycling!

Develop a Variety of Hiding Places for Gifts

Obviously, if you’ll be traveling for the holidays and using all of the suitcases at your disposal, you may need a bevy of secret-stash solutions:

• Hidden in plain sight — Would your kids (or your spouse) actually 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 of those 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.
• In a decoy household container — A similar idea, depending on the size of the gifts you want to hide, is using a decoy box may be just the ticket. Check your own storage spaces or ask your friends if they have boxes that were used for vacuums, TVs, or other medium-to-large appliances. A box labeled “seasonal décor” may suffice, unless someone else in your home is really eager to start decorating without your assistance. 
• Masquerading as kitchen equipment — The people who are most likely to sneak around and try to find their gifts are probably not looking in the Crock-Pot. A bread maker or ice cream machine may serve similarly. If you’ve got small-to-medium-sized gifts and unused, lidded pots and pans, this may work. Just don’t put a gift inside kitchen equipment and then gift that kitchen item as a gift and then let your wacky boss throw a hissy fit and turn the Secret Santa into a Yankee Gift Swap. (If you know, you know.)

• At your friends’ and 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.)
• In 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’ll 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!)
• Cardboarded up — Store all your wrapped, labeled gifts in the million Amazon and Chewy boxes you already have laying around your house. You can just stack them in the corner until you’re ready to put them under the tree or at people’s place settings, and then open the big cardboard boxes.

Photo courtesy of Kimberley Purcell

• Up in the attic — 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. 
• Inside old purses and backpacks — This is a riff on the old suitcase approach, but may be easier to access. If a shelf of your closet has all of your handbags, messenger bags, no longer used diaper bags, computer cases, or backpacks, load them up with wrapped gifts, as long as they’ll fit without scuffing the wrapping or stretching the container too much.
• In guest room — This is a good option assuming a) you won’t have guests between now and gift-giving time or b) the storage space in your guest room is ample enough to hide the kids’ things, at least, in drawers or closets, or under the bed. 
• In the guest bathroom — Sandwich wrapped flat gifts between guest towels; there’s almost no reason those box-shakers will be thinking to peek between the layers of towels. Consider it a fabric lasagna of secrecy.
• Laundry hamper — Let’s face it; nobody is enthusiastic about doing laundry. Your kids aren’t about to suddenly volunteer to take the laundry to your room to the washer/dryer, even to please Santa. Note: the humidity in a laundry room may be unfriendly to your wrapping paper, so try keep gifts well protected in the hamper or basket, perhaps covered by an old blanked or comforter.
• Inside board game boxes — Do you have board games that nobody has played since the Eisenhower administration? You have two options. You could just jettison the contents and replace it all with someone’s (or a bunch of someone’s) small gifts. Or, you could turn some of the gifts into surprises, if your family is more loosey-goosey with the gift exchange present exchange: put a LEGO mini-fig in with the Monopoly tokens or a gift card in your old game of Life, and then suggest a game.
• Hiding inside 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. You may want to warn your spouse, in-laws, or houseguests.
• Inside other holiday decorations — If you’ve got a hollow ceramic tree, a Santa cookie jar in which nobody expects to find actual cookies, or a Nutcracker the size of a Buick, gifts can wait within.
• Up, up, and away, or down among the dust bunnies — Let’s face it, you may not need to be creative at all. If everyone in your household is staring at screens all the time, just hiding gifts in a nondescript box at the top of any closet may work just fine. Similarly, if you’ve got a dust ruffle hiding the area underneath your bed (or the guest bedroom bed), and you don’t have pets or tiny humans at the crawling age, sliding things under the bed will work. 
• At the office, with a caveat — If you have a home office that’s off-limits to the rest of the household, or if you have decent private storage at your place of work, you’ve got additional hiding places for your gifts. However, if the gifts aren’t at home, they may not be covered by your homeowner’s insurance, so think twice before stashing something pricey that could get stolen or damaged if it’s at your workplace.

Wherever you hide the gifts, make a plan for when you’re going to pull them out of their hiding places, especially if it involves climbing up, wiggling down, or matching schedules with someone else.

Make a Treasure Map for Hidden Holiday Gifts

The key to hiding your gifts without making you crazy or ruining the holidays? Make a list of each person’s gift, what it is, and where you’ve hidden it.

Whether it’s hand-written or digital, hide it from prying eyes. On the computer or in the cloud, give it an innocuous name, as long as it’s one that you will remember. With a paper copy, keep it in your wallet, or tidy it away among the holiday bills — anywhere your average household member won’t think to look. 

In professional organizing, we often point out that if you have so many things, or so much clutter, that you can’t find what you own, it’s as if you don’t even after it. This is just as true for gifts you’ve stashed so safely that you’ve hidden them from yourself.

Try Some Sneaky Gift Labeling Tricks

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 Grandma, Dad, Aunt Jen, etc., use celebrity names but don’t match the names to the personality of the recipient. So, Dad gets Taylor Swift’s present, Uncle Joe’s gift says Dolly Parton, and the baby gets a gift labeled for Keanu Reeves.

Of course, you could pick any category group. Choose board games, and label different gifts as Scrabble, Monopoly, and Cards Against Humanity. Label your gifts with the names of different countries, cities, rides at Disney World, movie superheroes, or whatever suits your fancy. 

If your family isn’t inclined toward whimsy, you can just number the gifts. The key is that you really should know whose gift is whose before the unwrapping begins.

As with gift hiding spots, make yourself a cheat sheet matching real names to “gift” names.

GET WRAPPING SAVVY

Paper Doll is terrible at wrapping any gifts that don’t come in perfectly rectangular shapes. All the way 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 thirty-something) opening a stuff lion I’d wrapped so badly that only a two-year-old could look at it with any affection.

Many years ago, I offered up some alternatives for people with wrapping skill deficits. This was early enough in my blogging years that the formatting of the posts lacks some panache, but I stand by the efficacy of the solutions:

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)

Still, I’m obviously not the only person who has trouble wrapping presents when there’s no perfect box, as there are videos all over YouTube and social media, offering up guidelines for ensuring that enough wrapping paper (or a reasonable facsimile) prevents your gift from being naked.  For example, That Practical Mom has a short video with great gift-wrapping tricks:

The coolest trick, to my mind, is turning gifts diagonally when you don’t have quite enough wrapping paper.

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

WRAPPING & PACKING & SHIPPING, OH MY!

Finally, while I’m my logistical skills as a professional organizer are pretty top-notch, I’m definitely not an expert at wrapping and packing gifts. I generally buy gifts online and have them sent directly to recipients and then just warn them the day that the shipper says they’re arriving so they don’t spoil the surprise by opening them to early. Otherwise, I usually put presents in gift bags topped by an excessive amount of tissue paper and call it a day.

Luckily, Quill developed and Visualistan has shared this infographic to walk you through each of these holiday headaches. Isn’t this better than getting wrapped up in cellophane and ending up with a million mismatched and weirdly cut bits of wrapping paper? (That’s always so disorganized!)

You can also find more infographics at Visualistan.

THINK BEYOND TANGIBLE GIFTS

Of course, the best gifts don’t necessarily need to be wrapped or shipped. 

Over the years, I’ve written many holiday posts focused on giving gifts of experiences. It’s a lot easier to wrap, label, and hide gift cards and certificates for experiences than big, awkward, stuff-lions!

• 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 — think gift certificates for car washes or an auto club membership like AAA
• consumables — consider homemade yummies or one-time or subscription-based foods. Alternatively, give the opportunity to look forward to meals out with gift certificates to restaurants or coffee houses.
• organization and productivity — whether it’s a gift for a loved one, or a gift for yourself, opt for some delight and peace of mind with a session, or package of sessions, with a professional organizer (like Paper Doll), either in person or virtually.

For a more in-depth look at gifts of experience, you may want to review Paper Doll on Clutter-Free Gifts and How to Make Gift Cards Make Sense, which also harkens back to older Paper Doll posts on experiential gifts.

It may feel early in December, but the days pass quickly. Whether you’ll be celebrating Hanukkah starting this Sunday night, December 14th, or have ten more days after that for your Christmas Eve festivities, whether you’re celebrating Festivus, or Yule, or the Solstice, I wish you joy (and organization) through the end of this year, and into 2026.