Christmas wrapup - frugal and eco-friendly

My three year old daughter loves to paint.  She brings her paintings home for me and tells me all about them.

You get the picture.  She can draw people and things, but she's still a creative abstract painter.

So what do you do with stacks of these paintings that only a mother could love?

Beautiful and useful

Using kids' artwork as giftwrap solves two problems:

• How do I wrap my presents?
• What do I do with stacks of paintings that all look the same to me?

Family and Eco-Friendly

Wrapping gifts in alternatives to giftwrap is not just quirky and frugal, it's important.  It doesn't take much imagination to see the built-in waste of producing, packaging, buying, and disposing of square metres of decorated paper every holiday.  According to Earth911:

As much as half of the 85 million tons of paper products Americans consume every year goes toward packaging, wrapping and decorating goods. Also, wrapping paper and shopping bags alone account for about 4 million tons of trash annually in the U.S.

So does it look cheap and weird?

You decide:

More like unique and colourful!

Don't own any small perpetual artists?

Of course, not everybody will have this alternative.  

If these other wrapping alternatives don't suit, you could offer to babysit for your favourite family for a few hours, buy some old newsprint and paints, and have a giftwrap making (I mean fun painting) session!