Taking an evening out to really enjoy wrapping my gifts has been a ritual I have enjoyed all of my adult life. Before having a paper goods business, I would carefully curate my wrapping papers and ribbons in a theme for the year and take time to fully absorb what I had chosen for each person, and how their gifts may look on presentation.

The lights are down low, the music goes on (often not Christmas music!) and I make sure to have all ingredients bought in for my favourite seasonal cocktail (recipe here!). More often than not, I choose to do this alone, but sometimes my husband will join me and we’ll get slowly drunk over present wrapping. This year will be slightly different, owing to pregnancy - hence the cup of tea!

My favourite seasonal cocktail. Photo from fedandfit.com

I thought I would share my wrapping tips, cocktail recipe and all, on how I celebrate my sinking into festivities….

Pick a wrap theme for the year – decide on how you want your gifts to look e.g. monochrome/Kraft/rustic/minimal/natural and curate your wrapping essentials

Invest in good scissors. Nothing is worse than spending hours using rubbish tools/having terrible parcel edges. If you can’t then fold jaggy edges in!
Keep the boxes for your items…It’s tempting to shell the boxes for gifts you buy along the way. These can make your life so much easier in terms of wrapping - plus it looks better - so make sure you keep them, even if it’s a plain old cardboard box because you’re going to wrap it in lovely paper
Get together your ingredients for the perfect evening in - my favourite seasonal cocktail is a bourban/champagne/orange/spice extravaganza that I found on Fed + Fit and we’ve made it many times over the years for friends. Once you have made a large quantity of the syrup you can store it in the fridge and wheel it out whenever you feel
If you are looking to be more sustainable, then ditch the Sellotape/Scotch tape and make sure you pick up some paper tape. It is extremely easy to get off the paper after opening and plastic free
For an ultra flawless look, you can use glue dots, rather than tape; but, word of warning – the flat packets of these by Scotch or Bostik come laden in plastic. There are other options where you buy them on a paper roll, but ultimately they are not recyclable and need to be removed before you recycle/compost the paper
Use as little paper per item as possible, least of all because it is more sustainable, but also because it will look much neater in the end. When you lay your item on the wrap - the flank edges (those you will fold in) will need to be only half the depth of your item…folding in too much excess here leads to a messy-looking gift.
I love a tiered gift package, or tying one recipient’s gifts together in a little pile, which saves on tags but, regardless, it’s all about the finishing details. I love ribbon that is either sustainable (raffia is compostable and available in many different colours) or velvet, which I try to keep year on year.

And that’s it; what a gorgeous way to spend a relaxed evening in all the chaos of Christmas run-up!

Wrap party ritual