Suddenly Frugal Blog

I’m about to head upstairs and finish wrapping presents for Christmas Eve. So in the spirit of gift wrap, I thought you’d enjoy some of these stats, courtesy of the Scotch brand tape people, on how most people wrap (or don’t wrap) their gifts. Speaking of Scotch, I think that the Scotch Gift Wrap Cutter is one of the best inventions since sliced bread!

• One in four people wrap their holiday gifts one or two days before giving the gift (27 percent). Yup, it’s T-12 or so hours to Christmas Eve (when our family opens presents at my mother-in-law’s house) and I haven’t even started my wrapping.
• Another 22 percent wrap three to six days before the gift-giving occasion.
• When it comes to wrapping this year’s holiday presents, nearly three in four adults (71 percent) are most likely to purchase gift wrap supplies and wrap the presents themselves, while one in five (19 percent) will put items in a gift bag instead of wrapping them. Just three percent said they will have gifts professionally wrapped at a store. (Do those people still exist?)
• Nearly a quarter of adults surveyed (24 percent) list not having the right supplies on hand as the most common gift-wrapping mistake, second only to not knowing how best to wrap the gift (32 percent). Twenty percent cite wrapping with too little paper as the culprit, while another 20 percent say using too much paper is the big mistake.
• Just over half of the adults surveyed (53 percent) have saved and re-used gift wrap paper, with women (61 percent) more likely than men (44 percent) to recycle used gift wrap. Guilty as charged!

Where do you fall in the gift-wrapping spectrum?