Messy Monday: Wrap It Up Right Away!

Instead of spending all of Christmas Eve relaxing with my family after our evening church service, I've spent many an Eve wrapping gifts 'til the wee hours of the morning. This year, I am making a plan so the unwrapped gifts don't pile up. Last week, I wrote about preventing piles in the first place. Following those principles, my new guideline is: wrap it right away. Sounds so simple, doesn't it?!

I'm aiming to take a little bit of time each day to wrap gifts as I get them. That way, gifts will get wrapped a little at a time, and I won't find I vastly underestimated how much I had left to do on Christmas Eve.
So this week, I'll spend a few minutes each day wrapping the presents I already have around the house. This past weekend, when I went to a few Black Friday sales, as soon as I got home (or thereabouts), I went downstairs to my wrapping station (my husband is laughing at me for calling it a "wrapping station"--it's just our spare bed, but it's right at my level, and everything has plenty of room to stretch out on it). :) I wrapped up my kids' new toys and my husband's gift, and put the wrapped presents away neatly in a special hiding spot (not under the tree yet, because a certain one-year-old and two-year-old would have them unwrapped in seconds!).

If I keep this system up, I just might be able to actually open a few gifts on Christmas Eve!

On a related but slightly different note, I read Laura's post about a pre-Christmas purge of toys and books. I think it's a great idea to make room for the incoming items, but I have such a hard time figuring out what to send out. Just when I think my kids are done playing with something, that's the very thing they go for. If you do the purge, how do you decide what goes?