Dreaming of a White Green Christmas...

It was mid-winter 2009, and I faced a potentially disastrous holiday situation. Just hours away from Christmas Eve and lacking even a single roll of wrapping paper, I found myself staring at a mountain of unwrapped gifts. I asked myself what MacGyver would do in such a situation, and I quickly decided I'd have to improvise. While most people would proceed timidly in the face of the unknown, I forged ahead with a confidence that could only come from a strong track record of improvisational success.

My solution, much like myself, was simple and brilliant: newspaper. Whenever I used wrapping paper in the past, the wastefulness of the whole situation made me sick. Paper companies raze miles and miles of forest, and for what? To cover Christmas gifts for a few days, only to watch the paper get torn up and thrown away by December 26th. The wrapping paper industry must have John Denver and dead environmentalist hippies across the world spinning in their graves. I felt quite proud of my creativity and environmental sensitivity as I admired my pile of newspaper-covered gifts.

When Christmas 2010 rolled around, my choice of wrapping paper was a no-brainer: I would once again turn to the newspaper. No additional cost, no additional waste--clearly a win-win situation. Aside from helping out my old friend Mother Nature, I realized that wrapping my gifts with newspaper had a few other benefits that I hadn't considered in 2009.

First of all, wrapping with newspaper allows the gift-giver to custom-match the paper to the recipient. With standard Christmas-themed paper, your choices are pretty much limited to wintry landscapes, images of Santa or reindeer, or the basic red and green-colored paper. But with newspaper, the options are limitless. Giving a gift to an overweight food fiend? Wrap it with a Krispy Kreme or Old Country Buffet ad. An avid follower of business and politics? Wrap that present with a few pages from the Wall Street Journal. When you're selecting a paper for the convicted felon in your life, pull a page or two from the police report section of your local paper.

And it's not just newspaper's versatility that makes it my preferred method of wrapping--it's so much more informative. What can a person really learn from looking at stack of gifts that were wrapped with traditional Christmas paper? Absolutely nothing. I, on the other hand, learned a great deal during my brief gift-wrapping session. In less than thirty minutes that I spent wrapping with newspapers ranging in age from several weeks to several years old, I picked up countless invaluable nuggets of information, including, but not limited to the following: that Hy-Vee ran a sale on prime rib in late December 2009, that the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased by 19 points on May 24, 2005, and that Harold Barnes of Marshalltown, Iowa died at age 78 on June 25, 2008. Not once in all of my previous years wrapping gifts with "normal" paper did I pick up even a fraction of that kind of useful information.

When I finished wrapping, I decided 2010 was the year I'd attack another lingering gift-giving nuisance: the labels. Those sticky little "To/From" rascals seem every bit as wasteful as wrapping paper. And though I've never purchased any myself, I can only assume they're at least as expensive as wrapping paper. Luckily, I'd stumbled across an equally MacGyver-worthy solution a few months before while paging though the December, 2005 issue of BusinessWeek:

My favorite automobile manufacturer, General Motors, printed a full-page "Red Tag Event" ad, complete with actual To/From tags. The only potential snag in this plan was that each tag included a picture of one of GM's various automobile models. My first thought was that my gift recipients might jump to the conclusion that I'd bought them each a new car, but I realized these labels actually worked in my favor. Since they were General Motors cars on the labels, I felt confident that anyone opening one of my gifts would feel an overwhelming sense of relief when they realized that I hadn't burdened them with a lifetime of expensive and frustrating auto repairs. It didn't matter what newspaper-wrapped crap people pulled out of the box; relief and thankfulness were sure to follow.

With the labels in place, my task was complete. I was particularly proud of my wrapping job on one odd-shaped gift. With this cylindrical package, I immediately gave up on aesthetics and went straight for efficiency and practicality. What could have taken days to wrap ended up taking less than 15 seconds:

I avoided tape entirely and opted for three rubber bands and two full-page sheets of newspaper. My heart swelled with holiday spirit as I pictured Santa and Jesus high-fiving each other at the North Pole. I stood back and admired the final result of my tree-saving handiwork:

Sure, my gifts weren't as colorful as some of the others under the tree, but when they're all mixed together, newspaper doesn't look too bad (dim lighting and a slightly blurry photo don't hurt in this case, either):

For those of you who decide to adopt my wrapping strategy next Christmas, be warned that you will inevitably run into people who accuse you of "ruining the holiday spirit" or something similar. The logical rebuttal, obviously, is to accuse those of destroying the earth, and pile on the guilt as you point out their wasteful use of paper, labels, and bows, ribbons, and all that needless holiday decoration. And if they took the time to decorate their house with holiday lights, accuse them of wasting electricity, too.

Having flirted with perfection during the 2010 holiday season, you might find yourself wondering how I can possibly raise the bar again next year. The answer is simple: a Christmas-themed, gift-concealing curtain. This innovative idea is based on my vision of a world in which gift wrapping disappears entirely, suffering the same fate as the telegraph or childhood fitness and academic achievement in America. The exciting part is that I think we can abolish gift wrapping without losing that tremendous sense of anticipation and surprise that comes from unwrapping presents.

For the sake of environmental friendliness, the gift-concealing curtain will, of course, be fashioned out of durable, reusable organic cotton. Each holiday season, families across the country will set up their gift-concealing curtain and simply deposit their unwrapped gifts behind it, saving countless forests and thousands of hours of unnecessary wrapping. To keep the element of surprise intact, you'll have to find a neutral third-party to keep pets, curious children, and potential thieves from sneaking behind the curtain before Christmas. And, of course, this person can help distribute gifts on Christmas morning. I recommend an easily-bribed homeless person, who will jump at the chance to spend part of the winter indoors.

In the past, smiling parents watched their excited children tear the wrapping paper of their gifts on Christmas morning. In the Christmas of the future, parents can sit back and listen to screams of delight as the homeless man in the corner pulls the kids' Christmas gifts from behind the curtain, one at a time. It's my gift to the world--a sustainable Christmas tradition that saves time, money, the environment, and more than a few homeless people. The only sad part is that Christmas 2011 is so far way...