Over the past few years I have seen many, many YouTube tutorials and Pinterest posts all about how to add a bit of Christmas cheer to your present wrapping. Today I thought I'd take some of these ideas, along with some of my own to a 'master post' of sorts to give you all some ideas on how to make your Christmas gift giving that little more festive.


All the things that I bought to decorate my presents I managed to get all together for under $25NZD, and I ended up having quite a lot of stuff left over after wrapping just these four presents. What I got were:

- miniature baubles
- miniature bells
- thin tinsel string
- metallic string
- leaves and berries (fake or real)
- alphabet stamps and ink
- ribbon (not pictured)
- wrapping paper

I chose to use brown wrapping paper as I wanted the decorations on each gift to stand out on their own and not have a bright, colourful paper behind them become too distracting. I also feel like the brown has such a rustic feeling to it that it makes each decorated present a little more homely and a lot less "bought".



Present 1:

With this first gift I decided to go for a traditional design, with a combination of deep red berries and dark green leaves. I used fake foliage for this as I need these gifts to last a long time (when I go home in a month) and living in the central city during the height of summer, it proved to be a bit difficult to find some real "Christmassy" foliage! To contrast with the dark colours in the berries and leaves I went for the silver string to wrap around the present.

As the plastic branches I bought were actually pretty large, I only needed to use a little bit of each, which meant that these would have lasted for another two or three more gifts.



Present 2:

For this second gift I reused a piece of thick, white ribbon (when reusing ribbon, simply iron out on a low heat to make them look brand new!) and attached some silver jingly bells with a piece of leftover silver string. I love the combination of the white on the silver in contrast witht he dark brown wrapping paper.

I chose to leave the bells on their pre-attached string so that they moved when the gift gets picked up. To add a little bit of sparkle I added a star that was attached to one of the pieces of foliage to the centre of the bow.



Present 3:

This third gift I decided to add a whee bit of colour by using the golden baubles. Unfortunately I didn't think of a piece of material to tie up the box, so I used a spare pair of laces that I had lying around (clean and unused, of course!) I threaded the baubles onto the string, and like the jingle bells earlier I kept them on their pre-attached strings so they jumped about when moved.

Something that you could do differently with this could be to use various shades of the same coloured baubles, and even hot glue them onto the gift or the centre of the tie.



Present 4:

With this last gift I decided to go all out and use some tinsel to wrap around the box and finish off with a little bow.. I didn't want to add anything else to this design as I felt that the tinsel was very bright and colourful as it was, and I didn't want to add anything else that could possibly overpower the tinsel!



There you have it, four very quick and easy Christmas present wrapping ideas! The great thing about these is that they're not just limited to Christmas presents, you could adapt them to fit within a birthday by attaching something more birthday oriented instead of the bells or baubles.

If you happen to use any of these ideas, please let me know! Tag me in your photos or share links to them in the comments below! OR, if you have some other ideas I'd love to see and hear about them, especially if they involve real foliage/berries!

- Louise x