How we kept our boys from guessing all their gifts
Every Christmas it was always the same. Our boys would hunt under the tree and sort out their gifts by the gift tag, and pretty much figure out what was in each one. Even the cleverly disguised ones, like a tiny gift in a big box with a brick in it. So frustrating for me who wanted to keep them in suspense.
But one year, we changed one thing and it worked like a charm for that year and all the years after! (We still do it even this year, where our oldest two are in their early 20s and out of the house, and our youngest is 19.) I asked them, “Do we really need to still do this even now?” Their answer? A resounding YES! and some slight hurt that I would even consider NOT doing it.
Here’s how it works:
We wrap each son’s gifts in one specific wrapping paper. For example, one son will have gifts wrapped in green paper, another in a printed paper, and another in a different paper.
As I’m wrapping each son’s gifts, I snip off a bit of their paper and write their name on the back side of it and keep it secret.
Then we put the gifts under the tree WITH NO GIFT TAGS OR LABELS. (You might even get trickier about it if you have good guessers and wrap one child’s gifts in TWO different designs of paper. Just be SURE to take a snip of the paper and write names on it!)
On Christmas eve, as we stuffed their stockings, we would put that snip of paper WAY DOWN at the bottom of their stocking and they would have to dig it out and find their paper. Then they had so much fun sorting out their gifts and seeing which were theirs. This unexpectedly added another layer to the Christmas morning fun.
Lately I’ve taken to not putting the paper in the bottom of their stocking, but instead wrapping a few of their stocking stuffers in their paper. Either way works great and it is so much fun.
So if you have good gift guessers, I encourage you to try it and let me know how it works!
We did a similar idea last year and for the same reasons. I have 8 kids and didn’t want to buy 8 different papers, so I wrote numbers instead of names on the wrapped packages. On a separate piece of paper I wrote their names and which “numbers” were theirs and called out names/numbers on Christmas Day. It worked well and we will do it again this year!
When my now 10 year old was a toddler, I chose to not put out gifts until after he was asleep on Christmas Eve. I couldn’t trust myself to pay enough attention to keep him out the gifts, and he turned out to the child who didn’t have enough impulse control to stop himself when he was older. So, this is normal now! Luckily, neither Hubby or 10 year old have good perception checks so hiding things has been easy. My 5 year is better at noticing things, so I’m having to level up my “hide things” skill. I’ve thought about the different paper idea, but that means I have to plan ahead with paper in way I’m not any good at!
This is great, it’s my husband who is the naughty guesser! His mother even told me that, one year when he was little, she caught him unwrap a gift ever so carefully, then retape it so no one would know. 😀
Sometimes I color code my kids by the paper. Other times I do it by the ribbon. But this has worked well for us too. I was a naughty guesser when I was a kid, so it comes naturally for them, I suppose. 🙂