Christmas Gift Boxes

Reuse boxes and cut the waste this Christmas by making Christmas gift boxes instead!

We love the Holiday season but a pet peeve of mine is that so much gift wrap is wasted during Christmas. This year I decided to re-use some boxes for our Christmas gifts. We will use these to package homemade cookies for our friends and family.

You will need:

• Boxes
• Paint in festive colours
• Masking tape
• Paper or cardboard in different colours
• Craft bits and pieces
• Glue

What to do:

Start by painting your boxes white, this will save a lot of work once you start with the colours as you will need fewer coats of colour. Let your undercoat dry properly. Then, decide on a general idea of what you want your box to look like. I decided on stripes, plain colours and patterns for variety.

The kids did not really enjoy painting the boxes themselves so I did most of the work there. They did however thoroughly enjoy the rest of the decorations. (I think the stripy process was too “boring” for them as it takes a bit of time.)

Firstly, for the striped boxes, mask your lines and paint one colour, let dry, mask again and paint the next colour until you have the desired effect. I painted the next box red and the kids used a stencil to paint the silver stars. The other boxes were painted red and green and we painted a rectangle in the centre with chalkboard paint. We used a stencil again to paint the designs in the background.

We traced a Christmas Tree from a colouring book. Outline your tree with a black liner then add a bit of shading with a green crayon. Once you’ve cut out the tree you can “decorate” your tree with any interesting craft bits.

A stencil was used again for the decorations on our red box. Place your stencil on the paper, fill it with a thin layer of glue (we used normal Pritt) and sprinkle the glitter while the glue is still sticky. Remove stencil and cut out your design as soon as the glue is dry.

For Santa and Reindeer, trace the different parts of each picture on different coloured paper. Cut out all the individual parts and glue the individual layers, starting with the bottom layer. Outline in black. Add googly eyes, a pompom for Reindeer and buttons for Snowman.

Finally, we attached a bell to our Santa and Reindeer boxes for a bit of extra detail and added bows and name tags for a finishing touch.

All done with our DIY Christmas gift boxes! I am sure the receivers will love them as much as we did love making them! Give it a try and pass on the gift wrap this year!