Charles Dudley Warner, the famous American essayist and novelist once said, “The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in its value.”

So you’ve found the perfect gift, one completely appropriate for the recipient. But now you’ve realised that this gift also happens to be the impossible-to-wrap one.

Maybe the gift is oddly shaped and won’t fit in a box. Maybe the gift is digital and doesn’t have a physical form. Or maybe the gift is too big and can’t fit through your door. I was not very good at wrapping the easy ones so anything above that criteria was impossible. So I sought out advice from experts.

Here are their ideas about how you can easily wrap even the most impossible gift.

Oddly Shaped Gifts: Gift bags.  Just place the gift in the bag and cover with brightly coloured tissue paper; or put a large sheet of wrapping paper on the floor, design side down. Place the gift in the middle, and pull the four corners of the paper up and toward the middle. Close the top by tying the corners with a festive ribbon.

Gifts Without a Physical Form: Our modern computer age has brought a whole new challenge to wrapping gifts, those gifts like electronic books, downloaded software, or downloaded music.

– Burn the files for the digital gift onto a CD. Alternatively, buy a thumb drive or memory stick and copy the digital files onto the memory device; print the download instructions for the digital gift. Then purchase (or make) a Christmas card and include the printed instructions inside
the card.

Gifts Too Big to Fit Under a Tree: For large gifts you’ll have to find a “safe” hiding place. Some merchants might allow you to store the present at their store until just before Christmas. Alternatively, perhaps your garage or a storage shed can server as a good hiding spot. You might even consider using a neighbour’s garage (and getting your neighbour’s permission first is probably a good idea!).

With the gift in a safe spot you can still “wrap” the present and put it under the tree with one of these ideas: Use a Christmas card (or make one either by hand or using your computer) and announce the gift inside the card; wrap a small item to represent the gift and put it under the tree. Try to choose an item that hints at what the present is without immediately revealing the secret. For example, you might use a bike tire pump to represent a new bike, a car owner’s manual to represent a new car (I think most of us won’t be giving a gift this big), or a house key to represent a new house (this one requires some possession of sizable wealth).

So don’t let the impossibility of wrapping a gift keep you from selecting the present that is most appropriate for your loved one. Use one of these fun ideas to get that present “wrapped” and “under the tree.”