Free Gift Wrapper: How to Spend Nothing on Gift Wrapping

Well, almost nothing. Wrapping gifts would depend on your ingenuity and creativity. All you need are materials that you already have on hand. If ever, the material that you'll only need to buy would be sticky transparent tape (more commonly known here in the Philippines as "Scotch Tape") and some glue (which I doubt you don't have already.

After buying your gift, you still need to wrap it and it can be so frustrating to think about how much you'll spend for gift wrappers and ribbons, all the while thinking about how much of the environment is being destroyed by our merry making. Wrapping paper isn't that recyclable since some of it contain non recyclable materials like glitter, and tape.

Now we have to think of ways to reduce our trash without dampening that Christmas Spirit. Sure recycling wrapping paper is good but it looks frayed when reused, plus it's more fun to tear out the wrapping paper when opening gifts!

So what do you need to do to be able to wrap those gifts without spending anything (or almost)? Just look around you. and be imaginative.


Sources of Free Gift Wrapping Materials:

1. Home
2. School
3. Office

Free Gift Wrappers that can be Found at Home

1. Old wrapping paper
2. Papers, especially those reject prints and double sided print outs
3. Old books (gasp) that are to be recyled, especially cookbooks that have pictures
4. Old magazines and newspapers
5. Old greeting cards
6. Fabrics from old clothes, curtains, blankets, etc
7. Craft leftovers
8. Old and/or broken decorations
9. Old small toys, pendants and other knicnacks that can be used as danglers and tags
10. Boxes that came in with new stuff
11. Bubble wrap

Free Gift Wrappers that can be Found in School

1. Old test papers. Teachers usually just require this quarter's tests and seatworks. To be safe, you can use last year's test papers
2. School memos and bulletins. All you have to do with those is to return the reply slip. Instead of throwing the paper away, use it to wrap gifts
3. Fabric from old school uniforms that cant be handed down. repaired, or is too small to fit.
4. Old art supplies that are being kept for future (but no apparent) use. Like art and construction paper which we keep on buying a new pack when the color we want to use was already used up in a previous project

Free Gift Wrappers that can be Found in the Office

1. Papers that are no longer needed and can't be reused (i.e. papers that are printed on both sides)
2. Boxes that will just be thrown out. Comapanies keep the bigger boxes for storage, but some boxes that are too small or too weak are thrown out. (Think pen boxes, permanent and whiteboard marker boxes, etc)
3. Used up rolls of tape that can be used as a dangler (you still need to decorate it)
4. Shredded paper in the paper shredder bin
5. Old CDs that contain obsolete software or old files that won't be needed any more (or the data in the CD can also be found in a different CD with more updated data, etc)

Just make sure that the items that you take aren't going to be used anymore and doesn't contain any trade secrets nor confidential data.

Now that you know you can spend nothing on wrapping, skip the yuletide wrapping paper and tags and opt for a more earth-friendly wrapper.