Pretty Christmas Presents

What a busy few days we've had recently! On Friday night, we had the cousin's get-together at our house where lots of fond memories of Gran Ivy were shared. On Saturday morning we organised a last minute catch-up with friends of ours from Boston who are in Western Australia over Christmas. Luckily our house was nice and tidy after my big clean up on Friday but I did spend a lot of time in the kitchen cooking sausage rolls, whipping up some chicken and aioli sandwiches and baking a chocolate slice. Sunday morning we visited my Mum to swap Christmas presents (she has since left on her trip to the UK and contacted me last night to say they had landed safely in Manchester). Sunday afternoon was a Christmas party with extended family at Paul's uncle's beautiful home overlooking the river. Finally, yesterday was Paul's Gran's funeral which was a lovely service and fortunately, I managed to keep Grace occupied with bits and bobs from my handbag and she was very well behaved all day.





As for Christmas preparations, I've finally wrapped all our presents. I went with a red and white colour theme and used red and white printed gift wrap and a roll of polka dot paper too. With some gifts, I wrapped a band of contrasting paper around before tying on a ribbon. I didn't wrap all our presents prettily (especially not the children's presents!!) I just focused on the gifts for friends and family who I knew would appreciate a carefully wrapped gift. It was wonderful that the ribbons and bakers' twine Catherine included in the little package she sent me were all red and white colours too as they fit in perfectly.

As for gift tags, I used a combination of the lovely ones Catherine made and sent to me (you can see her kraft paper ones in the photo above) and then, the other day I spotted a roll of packaging tape which matched the one she had used on her tags so I bought some and used it to make some more simple tags of my own. I also used the tape on a few presents which you can see below.

I truly do enjoy giving gifts more than receiving them. I like to think I've carefully chosen a gift that will be appreciated and enjoyed and even more, my favourite part of Christmas preparations is wrapping all the presents. I do still have half of one gift to buy (although I'm hoping Paul will sort that one out for me) and I need to get something small for Grace but apart from that, all I need to do before Christmas is make two desserts and I'm all set!!

How are all your Christmas preparations going?