Our Top 3 Printable Holiday Gift Tags

If you ever buy another gift tag, you will be wasting money. Here are a few of our favourites among the hundreds of printable ones you can find on the internet.

FREE & EASY | While most of us put thought, time and money into the paper and ribbon we use to wrap Christmas presents, gift tags are apt to receive only brief and unsympathetic treatment. My brother, for example, doesn’t bother with tags at all, preferring instead to use a Sharpie to scrawl the recipient’s name across the top of his offerings. I’ll cut him the tiniest amount of slack given he’s an overworked business exec with a partner who’s not into Christmas, but the rest of us have no excuse for going such a lacklustre route with so many gorgeous, printable gift tags available for free on the internet. Here are three of our favourites, plus tips on using printable tags effectively.

RULE # 1: Choose a tag with a repeating and uniform pattern that fills a letter-size sheet of paper; they will be the easiest ones to cut out. I love the tags from Fifth & Hazel pictured at the top of this story. What’s easier to cut out than a rectangle? (CLICK HERE to get them, and HERE for a different style.)

RULE #2: There are alternatives to card stock. While I can’t be sure that Sass & Peril used anything other than card stock for the tags pictured above, I’ve made these very ones with extra-heavyweight, supersmooth 32-pound premium laser paper and found them plenty sturdy. In fact, I use only 32-pound paper for gift tags and find it’s easy to cut and holds up as long as it needs to. (CLICK HERE for Sass & Peril’s PDF.)

RULE #3: Consider printing in black and white and eliminating tie attachments. Last year, I used these tags from Design Sponge on all my presents.  Sometimes we left them in b/w, sometimes we used markers to add a sketchy spot of colour. We didn’t use glue to stick our tags to the wrapping the way Design Sponge did, but we did employ garbage bag twist ties (cut in half) instead of ribbon or twine like Sass & Peril did above. (CLICK HERE for Design Sponge’s tags.) —Annabel Lee