A Link to the Past

I probably have enough Christmas wrap to last for the rest of my life. I can’t resist buying it when it goes on sale after Christmas, and I also often find unused rolls or partial rolls of it on my estate-sale rambles, since an estate sale can include everything that was in the house at the demise of the owner. Sometimes this estate-sale Christmas wrap has a definite vintage look, and some even dates from the era when wrapping paper came folded rather than in rolls. Designs might feature children in 1950s clothing playing with very gender-specific toys, like dolls for the girls, and cars, trucks, and trains for the boys.

Being frugal, I also save and reuse the paper that wraps gifts that come to me. Since my sisters, who live on the opposite coast from me, have the same frugal gene, some Christmas wrap has made the trip across the country more than once, the same piece being used to wrap successively smaller boxes as the usable part shrinks.

I thus have a large, and growing ever larger, stockpile of Christmas wrap. But this year I got an idea for something else to do with it, besides wrapping gifts. Recalling the paper chains children used to make as Christmas decorations—with construction paper and paste as I recall, it occurred to me that my colorful odds and ends of recycled Christmas wrap, the ones too small to use as wrapping for anything but tiny boxes, could be used just like construction paper to make chains for my tree.

I cut my scraps of wrapping paper into rectangles 4-1/2 inches by 2-1/2 inches and folded them the long way to make 3-layer strips. I made the folded strips instead of just using one layer of paper in order to give the chain’s links more body. Some old wrapping paper, especially, can be thin and quite brittle. Then I fastened one end of the strip to the other, with a slight overlap, using clear tape. After I made the first link, I slipped each successive strip through the previous link before taping its ends together.

I spent several very enjoyable hours listening to Christmas music as I created my chains. Some pieces of my repurposed paper still had TO and FROM stickers still on them from their previous use to wrap gifts. At times, I felt a bit melancholy seeing the names of givers and receivers, and remembering Christmases past—even a Ghost of Christmas Past when I came upon a fragment of paper bearing a sticker indicating the gift it originally wrapped had been from a brother-in-law who is no longer among the living.

Despite the melancholy, the chains look very pretty on my tree, and they are giving lots of pretty paper scraps a second—or third, or fourth—life. You can see the results of my chain project in the December Yarn Mania post on my website. The post actually deals with a batch of little crocheted tree ornaments I came upon last year at an estate sale, but I photographed them hanging on my tree, with lengths of chain visible here and there, and I included a photo of a long length of chain not yet on the tree. Here’s the url for the Yarn Mania post: https://peggyehrhart.com/crocheted-ch...

I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season!