An Ignoble Experiment: [Parent Hacks] 1 new post in Parent Hacks

2008/12/08

[Parent Hacks] 1 new post in Parent Hacks

Hello, ignoble.experiment@arconati.us, and thank you for subscribing to Parent Hacks. Got a hack you'd like to share? Send it to hacks@parenthacks.com, along with your name and Web address (if you'd like us to link to you).

Number the gifts under the tree to keep the kids guessing which ones are theirs

A little gift-giving mischief from Genie:

When I was a kid, my siblings and I would spend hours around the Christmas tree looking at the gifts. We, like most kids, would try to figure out what was in our boxes - much to the dispair of our mother. Finally, one year, she came up with an idea to fool us all, including Dad! Instead of writing our names on the to/from tags, she assigned each one of us a number and wrote that number on the tag. Of course, the only person who knew which number went with which family member was Mom (and she wrote down the list in a secret spot just in case she forgot on Christmas morning). So, we kids had no idea which box was for us and even less of an idea of what might be inside. It didn't lessen the looking at the pile of gifts, but it did limit the guessing.

Other parents I've heard of will wrap a jingle bell or something inside of a box with clothing... just to fool the kiddos.

Do you have any gift-anonymizing tricks up your sleeve?