Quick Tags for Last Minute Gifts

Merry Christmas to you all on this last day before Christmas Eve! I hope you are all ready for Christmas, your shopping is done, parties are planned, home is decorated and your presents are wrapped. For the most part, I am ready and so excited! I love the magic of Christmas and all of the fun activities it brings. However, underneath my tree right now are presents for my parents, my in-laws, for various cousins and siblings and some for my husband. What is missing are all the gifts for my kids! Those presents are still hidden deep in the confines of my walk-in closet and various corners of the storage room (my kids better not be reading this!)

I have had a VERY hard time wrapping those presents for kids-- we have all been so busy the last few weeks and when I'm home, they are right there! By the time they're in bed, I am ready to go to bed too or I've got some other projects to do. And so, my post today offers you a quick gift tag idea for those last gifts you haven't wrapped yet-- maybe some of you out there are like me and haven't managed to find a chance to pull out all those kids' gifts and get them wrapped. My plan for late tonight is to finish that wrapping and then use these gift tags for my kids presents:

I love using photo tags for my kids' presents-- it gets old writing "from Mom & Dad" on so many packages (they usually each get several from us under the tree, times that by the 3 of them). Plus, they love to look for their faces under the tree and know those surprises are for them.

I printed out some quick recent photos of my kids just on regular printed paper, as most likely these will just get lost and later thrown away in all the mess of unwrapping on Christmas morning. Then I punched a scalloped square tag from Echo Park's Wintertime papers to attach my pictures too. I love the colors in this paper line!

Then I went to work embellishing them with some gems and pearls (for our current challenge) and other embellishments such as lace and Prima flowers. I used letter stickers from the WinterPark kit to put their initial on each tag along with a few snowflake and border stickers from the same sticker sheet.

I think photo tags are a really fun way to personalize the gifts you are giving, here are a few other suggestions for types to make:

*For presents from your family, make a tag that includes a picture of all of you

*For presents from grandparents, make a tag that includes a picture of the grandparent when they were young, this way the tag becomes a keepsake as well (I did this several years ago when helping my grandmother with her shopping and wrapping, the tags were a huge hit among my aunts, uncles and cousins-- not many of them had pictures of my grandmother when she was young and they were delighted to get them)

*For any family presents, make tags that include pictures from Christmases past, then you can reminisce about previous holidays while celebrating the current one.

Now that I've got my pile of tags ready to go, I'll be up late tonight wrapping those kids' gifts and anxiously awaiting the light in their faces when they tear them open on Christmas morning. To all our Beary Scrap fans out there, I hope you have a wonderful holiday season!