Blog Hop - Wrapping Up the Holidays

Happy December! I am SO excited for the Christmas season. The lights, the music, the decorations, the baking, the general holiday spirit -- I love it all! One thing I don't love? All the spending. It's so incredibly easy to go over budget come Christmastime, and while we're not quite "poor, starving college students" we are on a student budget. So this month, for our Wrapping Up the Holidays blog hop, I'm showing you some of my favorite -- and cheap! -- gift wrap options.

Can you believe that the US spends $2.6 BILLION each year on gift wrap?! That's absurd! Especially if you grocery shop. My favorite "trick" is to use the brown paper grocery bags as wrapping paper. Simply stamp a few Christmas-y images on it and tie it with some cute ribbon or twine, and you have cheap (and eco-friendly!) gift wrap a-plenty!

Gift tags can get expensive, too. Instead of buying them, I dug through my craft drawers and found some old washi tape (from last year's Holiday Catalog) and some Whisper White cardstock, and I made my own!

Adding rhinestones to the tags gives them a little bit extra holiday sparkle, don't you think?

The cute little To/From stamp is from a retired set called "Sleigh Full of Toys", and I love it!


Oh, you want some budget-friendly decor ideas, too? Hit the dollar store! Remember the super-cute rope-wrapped vase I made last month? I swapped out the fall-themed (Dollar-store) flowers for some poinsettias from my Christmas box, and voila!

We also hung Christmas lights (which we got on sale last year for super-cheap) on our balcony, since we finally have an outdoor space to decorate!

So there you have it! My budget-friendly Christmas blog hop. Be sure to hop on through the rest of the blogs to see what they're showing off today.

Oh, and MERRY CHRISTMAS!