Living in a household of just two people, there don’t end up being very many Christmas presents under the tree for just me and my husband. There are always lots under there for my extended family and friends, though. All those presents fall into one of three groups for us: there are presents to give to friends when they visit or to take to parties, presents to open at home on Christmas morning, and presents to take to my parents’ house on Christmas day to open with the family.

So when it comes time to pull presents from the pile for one of these reasons, it’s a pain to have to search through them all. Which ones are for my niece? Which ones are for the neighbors? Did we get them all in the car before we leave? A couple of years ago I came up with a good way to help this situation — I color code the gift wrap! There are two different ways I like to do it:

The first method is to use one pattern of paper for all the gifts in each group. For example, use the Santa print for the friends’ gifts, the blue snowflake print for our gifts to each other, and the snowman print for the gifts for the family. This makes it so much easier to get everything together in a hurry… we just grab all the boxes that are wrapped with a certain paper and we’re set.

The other technique is to use the same paper for all the gifts, but vary the color of the ribbon. I simply find a paper that looks good with several different colors of ribbon and use a color for each group. It’s so easy when all you have to do is grab the packages with the purple ribbons or the red ribbons.

If you’ve got more people in your family and don’t find yourself taking piles of presents elsewhere (like we do), you can still make use of this technique. Just color code your presents for each member of the family. Your little girl’s presents can all be wrapped in princess paper and your son’s in cartoon paper. Mom and Dad can have paper they like, and nobody has to deal with reading those tiny little tags that always seem to fall off under the tree.