Amazon Bags

Every year for Christmas, we get a number of gifts from friends or family members from Amazon, where they have selected to have Amazon wrap the present before arrival.  In recent years, Amazon has taken to delivering wrapped presents in these very sturdy drawstring bags in green, blue, grey, and red.  They come in various rectangular sizes, with the largest being gusseted at the bottom to accommodate larger items.  Here's one of their classic polka dot blue bags, of which I have many:

I selfishly use them only for family holiday gifts because I know I'll get to recollect them at the end of Christmas morning so I can use them again the following year.  I don't like to let them wander off to places unknown, on account of I'm not likely to get them back.  Amazon, by making such visually pleasing and reusable bags, is likely saving countless paper waste in wrapping paper every year.   They're sturdy enough that they just look too nice to throw away and that, in and of itself, may be sufficient reason for people to keep them and reuse them.

They aren't holiday-specific although there is a nice red and green.  Even those colors aren't typical holiday bright red and green but a more muted earth tone of each.   This year at our friends' present swap, I was interested in presents people were giving and receiving, but I even admitted to everyone the thing that most caught my attention was the new color and pattern options of Amazon bags.

Today, I took some time to wrap, or in this case, package up, our family gifts for Christmas.   I'm close to done, and I still have bags to spare.   Typically we have a huge trash can full of wrapping paper and ribbon all balled up for recycling.  I'm not sure how much of the holiday paper successfully makes it through the recycling process as most family's holiday wrapping is typically contaminated by ribbon, plastic and is in a plastic bag that doesn't meet the recycling waste requirements for this area.

Saving time and reducing paper waste, not to mention making opening packages easy for everyone: all wins for the holidays and planet Earth.   Thanks, Amazon.

The Big Boy Update:  My son has been chain watching Mark Rober today, leaving his videos up and playing even when he left the room to go do other things.   He got sidetracked to another channel with two men who make all sorts of "hacks" (one of my son's favorite words).  I'm not sure about the hacks channel, but they're making interesting things, they don't have an educational message behind it.   For now, though, my son hasn't been complaining about YouTube.   He's been successfully distracted from the video game-related channels he typically watches, that his father and I don't believe are the best use of his screen time.  Mark Rober has great videos.  Every time I walked through the room I'd get stuck watching how they solved a problem such as how to best skip a stone across a pond and what his nieces and nephews did to figure out the problem together.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter got hit by her brother several times today.  He kicked her once too.   Yes, he was physically violent to her, which we addressed, but she almost asked for it, pestering him and not leaving him alone, even when he told her multiple times to stop.   She's delicate  from an eye perspective, but she's tough in a lot of other ways.