Brown Paper Packages

Holiday Traditions: Brown Paper Packages

Every year for many, many years now, my husband and I wrap our Christmas gifts in plain brown paper. We started with using green string as the only decoration with a simple gift tag. It has evolved into a fun Christmas tradition of drawing on the packages, at first with simple pen, then some color marker and then full blown art with color pencils. At some point in this process, I started to pick a theme for each holiday. One year was all about snowmen, another Santa and his elves, another reindeer.... And a new tradition was born.

I love creating these packages. Besides helping get into the festive mood, it's non-stress artwork, where I can draw whatever I want without any expectations of having to be perfect. This was something I did for fun and for the enjoyment of the receivers. I didn't take pictures most of the years, because I didn't really care, and as an artist of many years, I'm not that attached to every piece of art I do, so I let it go out into the world to suffer the fate of being ripped open, or whatever. Not until later when it became more of a thing that people always mentioned and loved about getting gifts from us, that my husband decided to start photographing the packages. I've shared a few of those with you. Enjoy!

 

This year will be a little different however, since we are not really doing gifts. To get my holiday artistic fix, we will be decorating sugar cookies with artistic style. Or so we hope. I've decorated cookies in a basic way, but we're going to try do do this the fancy way and make one-of-a-kind cookies for people on our gift list. I'll share the results, so stay tuned.

What are your favorite holiday traditions? Feel free to share in the comments what family traditions you enjoy.

Happy holidays!