Excuse the short digression here, but: when I was a kid I learned to tie my shoes. When I was a teen, velcro shoe closures came into being, if not exactly into style. A LOT of kids stopped learning to tie shoes when this happened. In much the same way, I was very well acquainted with paper, tape, glue and ribbon as a child. Kids these days live in an increasingly digital world and are not so very acquainted as I was. And as far as gift wrapping goes... I think the gift bag is the velcro shoe closure of presents. It takes zero brain power to stuff something in a gift bag, and no fine motor skills. So I thought it would be fun to take it a little old school and work with the girls on how to actually cut, wrap, tape and adorn a gift in a box. BECAUSE WHAT IS A BIRTHDAY WITHOUT PRESENTS?
So for our activity we had a lesson on gifts and on wrapping. Then these presents were put in our Activity Day closet and will feature in our next activity, Birthday Bash part 2, as the gifts that will be used in our gift exchange.
The spiritual message (took about 10 minutes):
Display two gifts, one in cute wrapping, one in not so nice wrapping (each package will contain the same item-- something nice, I used a large pink glass paperweight) Tell the girls we have two gifts and each has a lesson inside.
Have the girls guess what might be inside each. Which one would they choose to receive? Why?
Opening the ugly gift: The first lesson is: don’t judge a gift by the wrapping. A great treasure can come in an ugly package. We don’t always know, by looking at the outside, that something wonderful is on the inside. This is very true with people: Every person you meet is a child of God, and has great worth, no matter what you see on the outside.
Opening the pretty gift: Lesson #2: Were you more excited to see what might be in this package? Did you suspect it might be something wonderful? That’s because this gift is presented it in a nice way. Presentation means “the manner or style in which something is displayed.” We all have choices about how we present ourselves, and presenting ourselves nicely usually means that people will be much more interested and excited to see what is inside our “package.”
So while we should NOT judge others on their “wrapping”, and would hope that others would do the same for us, it is STILL wise of us to realize that we can and should present ourselves well. People who are clean and modestly dressed, with a smile on their face are generally going to be more pleasantly treated than someone stinky, dirty, in old ragged clothes, or even who just has a mean, grouchy look on their face.
Here are some things that we can choose, that can make a big difference in how people see us (and not all of it has to do with how we look!). For example:
smiley face or grouchy face
clean or dirty
modest or immodest
plays fair or cheats
works hard or is lazy
kind or unkind
So as we learn about nice wrapping tonight, remember, you are a gift. No matter your wrapping, you have value and worth. You may wisely choose to let the good that is inside you show on the outside too: Not with expensive clothes or fancy hair bows, but having a smile on your face, a clean body, and displaying good qualities towards others make us all lovely.
The practical lessons: the wrapping needed lots of hands on help from leaders
I looked for/purchased/created several inexpensive gift items. For example, mini notebooks, 3 for $1.29 at Walmart, but I used scrapbooking paper and supplies to dress them up. I got wedding bubble favors for cheap, and added washi tape to make them look extra cute, made some paperclip bookmarks, made some fortune tellers, got some candy, bought chapstick (and again, dressed it up with scrapbooking supplies and washi tape), got stickers, etc.
I won't deceive you: for 15 girls, even inexpensive gifts ($3 per girl) would be $45 so this was far from cheap, and that does not include supplies I already had on hand like the scrapbooking paper. You could set your limit to $1 per girl and do things like bubbles, stickers, and candy. My idea was to have a variety of things so that the girls could really "shop" but they could have the same experience for less money.
I put a price on everything and gave the girls a $5 limit on their shopping. I made sure to have enough in the store that items would be left over. There were NOT 15 of everything which meant the gift combinations would be different and unique.
I also spent money on boxes ($1 for 3 boxes at the dollar store) so the girls would all have a box to shop into/wrap. We also lined the boxes with the left over tissue paper from our Mother's Day craft.
The shopping took about 15 minutes. Then the wrapping began!
I showed the girls how to wrap the paper around the box to measure the right amount to cut, how to cut neatly and leave the leftover paper for another use, how to fold corners neatly, and how to tape nicely. Everything seems to take longer with many hands. If I can wrap a gift in 5 minutes, helping 15 girls to do the same thing will take about 30 minutes!
We all also made tags (from: our name to: a friend) and learned how to curl ribbon and wrap it on a package.
Between these three things: lesson, shopping, gift wrapping session... we used up all 90 minutes! Had we had time left over I was prepared to give the girls a short spiel on writing thank you notes when receiving a gift, and to possibly even write a thank you note to a parent or teacher.
I also had brought brown paper grocery bags and was going to show how to cut the bag apart and use it as simple, inexpensive wrapping paper: we also did not have time for that. But it would have been fun!
Setting up my "store" took FOREVER, although it doesn't look that hard. It wasn't hard, it just took awhile to write out the price tags, get things out of the bags/boxes I brought them in, and get them arranged. About 30 minutes worth of work, plus setting up the gift wrapping supplies and etc. Let's just say I was really glad I was able to get there 45 minutes early that night!
This was a simple activity in CONCEPT... but it did take a lot of time to put together. If you are working with a team of leaders and can split the set up and the preparation on the gifts, it would be pretty do able.
This activity needed:
LOTS of scissors (at least one pair for every two girls)
LOTS of tape (at least one roll for every three girls)
wrapping paper
ribbon
the store items
boxes for the gifts
tissue paper (optional)
pens for writing names on tags
lots of helping hands! :)
