The Holiday Gifts Process

Start thinking and planning ahead of time. This means anything from 8 months to one day.

Since most of what gets sent out is made rather than bought, acquire materials and skills. This means anything from years to a week. The few items which are bought instead of made are seasonal and sell out in the store within a week of arriving, so timing is luck, especially when you are working to avoid stores as much as possible. Plan to be lucky.

Once the concepts are decided on, begin collecting materials, tools, wrapping paper, tags, pens (yes, plural!) addresses, mailing supplies (other than what is only in the post office) in one central location. Otherwise known as the house. Or narrowed down, mostly the living room. Mostly. There is that one thing which is being stored in the bedroom, up and out of the reach of dog hair.

Begin construction. Correct mistakes, restart. Make sure to empty wastebaskets regularly.

Once you believe you have finished, compare items to gift list, and construct more items to fill in the gaps. Repeat as necessary.

Wrap and tag items. Note both must be done for each item before going on to the next. Seriously, failure to do so can result in the waste of wrapping paper, tape and tags when you discover one person's gift is both in your hand and already wrapped and on the table at the same time, requiring the unwrapping of the second and rewrapping with the correct gift tag once the correct recipient has been determined. This entire process must be concluded the night before the annual trip to the post office, since during a pandemic a single trip is the ideal number.

Review wrapped items, adding extra tape where needed, particularly where those sticky tags bought 4 years ago (hey, sale, folks)  have diminished in their capacity to cling to the appropriate packages.

Purge gift tags, throwing out those which no longer accept the ink of any pen in the house. I bet you thought I was going to say those which no longer stick, but we just solved that one, didn't we?

Arrange to send as many packages as possible to central locations, picking the one person in a locale who is the central social hub for most of the others and who will connect with them within a reasonable time to distribute the gifts. 

Make sure that a suitable box is available for the above plan. It helps to make most of your shipped gifts small.

Check addresses to see who has moved since last year. If they  don't respond, and there is no third party who can verify their address, decide whether you really want to send their package this year. Make allowances for possible Covid victims who may take an extra two months to get back to you - if they can. You may decide that they are just rude, in which case, reevaluate your desire to send a package at all.

For items which are combined in a box, and where your plan is to get said box(es) at the post office, bring along good packing tape, scissors, addresses for each box, pen, and extra packing materials to fill in the empty spaces. Ordinarily this means asking the person in the household who knows where the totes of bubblewrap are currently stored, but if he is sleeping, your generous supply of crumpled plastic grocery bags from all those shopping trips where you forgot to bring your own sturdy bags from home will be a good substitute, and can still be recycled after the box is opened at its destination.

Where more than one P.O. box is to be packed with several gifts, sort ahead of time into bags for each destination. Don't forget to check what box sizes they have available first so you know what is feasible as well as how much packing material to bring. Each of those bags of sorted gifts can go into a large Hefty Bag, along with another bag of padded envelopes to be sent to individual recipients, plus a bag of packing tape, scotch tape if some of your wrapping exceeds your optimism in its ability to pop apart in all the handling, scissors, address information on sheet of paper (you did remember those pens?) which can be slipped in the box after writing on the outside before final taping. Make sure to bring your credit cards along with your list of needed stamps, including those two international stamps you'll need this year.

Uh, you did make and bring a list, didn't you? For everything? Further, you have actually reviewed it, right? Honest?

All these items can be placed into a large Hefty bag. Several advantages are provided by this. All of it is together with only one hand needed to move it into/out of car, into post office, up on counter that you are going to hog all to your self while you are preparing your boxes, and everything can go back inside to be securely dragged behind you across the floor while you proceed slowly through the line, rather than having to wear out your arms carrying everything. You don't risk dropping anything or leaving it behind, it holds whatever supplies you wish to take back home, and should it be raining (RAIN! In Arizona! Today!!!! Yahoo!) all is protected. Plus it arrives home intact, ready for the next load of garbage going out.

Time allotted for the post office should be about an hour. This includes boxing, and sliding your haul through the well-marked six-foot-intervals line, actually the quicker of the two tasks. Yes, it takes a while, but much care is taken in arranging items in those boxes. Understand that the plan to arrive early while it is still raining briskly does not in fact deter all those others with similar errands on their minds, leaving you with fewer competitors for virus-free air. Nice thought, but....

Trust the masks, Heather, trust the masks.

Upon arriving home, sit down and email all the package/padded envelope recipients a quick heads-up with their tracking numbers included. This is both a courtesy and a warning to keep an eye out the day it is expected.

The not-quite-empty Hefty bag can be dumped in the first spot convenient until whenever it is needed, or its contents are, or you are possessed with a sudden attack of neat-freak-ism. Just warn everybody it is not ready to go out to the garbage yet. That good packing tape is expensive!

Then just relax. You're done until the cards you ordered online, in order to avoid another hour in a store, arrive from Portland and you have to start addressing them. You're good to sit until the dog needs to go out again. It's raining. She'll wait - she's an Arizona dog and rain is scary.