The bed in our back room is covered with plastic bags, the result of my hitting the holiday sales over the past few weeks. I’ve got a mountain of gifts to wrap, but I’m armed and ready.

Like most thrifty shoppers, I’ve got at least five rolls of holiday wrapping paper in the back of my closet. I can’t resist the after-Christmas 75 percent off rolls of paper; and by the time the 90 percent rolls come around, the paper’s almost free.

Of course, there’s only about three feet of paper on the rolls and the printing is sometimes off center. Santa might be wearing a Hawaiian shirt and the reindeer often look like beavers, but at 90 percent off, who’s complaining?

Over the years, I’ve camouflaged gifts in a variety of wrapping papers. One year, I used the comics pages from the Sunday paper. I saved those comics for over three months, but I still ran out at midnight and resorted to using remnants of rolls from the past three Christmases.

Then there was the year I decided to wrap everything in brown paper. I got the idea from my sister-in-law, Janet, who wrapped her gifts in brown paper and had her children decorate the outside with free-hand drawings.

What I didn’t know is that brown wrapping paper is heavy and practically requires duct tape to seal the edges shut. And while her children drew pretty candy canes and snowmen on the front, my boys went all out with Ninja Turtle battles and blood-drenched superheroes.

And then there’s the matter of the labels. I’ve used old computer labels, index cards cut in half and I’ve even written right on the wrapping paper. My boys believe masking tape is the perfect to/from label – cheap, easy to write on and the vanilla color stands out against the red and green.

But no matter how the gift is wrapped and tagged, the best part of wrapping gifts is making bows. I have three coat hangers in my closet, each one holding four or five different spools of curling ribbon.

It’s easy to cut the exact length I need and I can use a variety of colors for a one-of-a-kind bow. I spend quite a bit of time making sure the bows match the wrapping paper, and then I use the edge of the scissors to curl the ribbon into long tendrils.

I settled on curling ribbon after the year I decided to use raffia to decorate the boxes. Martha Stewart promised that raffia-wrapped gifts would be the hit of the evening. So I wrapped every single box with strands of red raffia and tied big raffia bows to the fronts.

They looked fabulous underneath the tree. The only problem was nobody could pull the raffia apart, and we ended up using scissors to cut every single bow and raffia ribbon from every single present. The boys made me promise I’d never try to copy any more gift wrapping ideas from Martha.

Instead of chasing after trendy gift wrapping ideas, I should probably follow the example of my son, Stephen. He’s found the perfect wrapping paper for birthdays and Christmas – aluminum foil.

Not only are his gifts instantly recognizable, our Aggie claims the receiver can then use the foil in the kitchen or to clean off the barbecue grill.

Foil – the perfect gift wrap – recyclable, original and cheap. Now that’s what I call creative gift wrapping.

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.