Life Tips Daily

Christmas Eve is one short week away. How are you coming along with your shopping and other preparations?

My shopping is somewhere between one half and two thirds completed for family members, and somewhere near 0% completed for friends; but I’m not at all stressed about it this year for some reason.

For those of you who have purchased all your gifts and perhaps even wrapped them all, where are you hiding them so that the curious don’t have a chance to feel or shake gifts in the hopes of guessing its contents? Do you keep your presents lying in plain sight, but leave the gift labels off them to confuse recipients?

Here are some good hiding places for gifts:

Car trunk
I heard this idea today and it’s a good one: if you have children who are too young to know where the house keys are, or who don’t know how to turn a key, this a foolproof place to keep gifts. This idea might not work so well for older children or a spouse who share the car with you though. Also, depending on the gift, this idea works best if you don’t live somewhere with extreme temperatures, where you might have to worry about gifts being stored below or way above freezing temperatures for a period of time.

Somebody else’s house
You can swap gifts with a friends, and let your recipients know that any gifts they see lying around are not for them; that all their gifts are at someone else’s house. This may deter the curious from bothering to look closely at gifts, especially when they see them labeled with somebody else’s name. If this works well, next year you might want to say the same thing but not actually keep the gifts elsewhere: just label them with names of other people.

Note: this plan could backfire if someone gets their friend to do some reconnaissance work to discover what their gifts are.

The garage or shed
If you have a corner of the shed or garage that you can disguise with some old equipment, and hide gifts behind, you’ve found an ideal hiding place. There usually isn’t much action going on in the shed or garage in the colder months, but if it’s sunny year round where you live, this may not make an idea hiding spot.

At work
A former coworker of mine actually had some of her gifts delivered directly to her workplace, and she was able to keep them a secret from her curious family in that way. This idea works best if you have some personal office space; coworkers might not find your pile of gifts stacked in a communal area very appealing.

I know I haven’t gotten them all: where do you hide your Christmas gifts?