Nary an elf

• DJ:
• What should I do if my wife and I want to wrap gifts for friends and family but we don’t like the usual holiday motifs? Call me crazy, but corpulent Santas and stylized sugarplums don’t do it for me.
• — Darren, La Mesa

• Dear Hipster:
• How do hipsters wrap gifts?
• — Cody

Many hipsters avoid the problem of tacky, holiday-themed wrapping paper by concealing their thoughtfully selected gifts behind layers of artisan wrapping paper available at many online outlets or your local art store. I happen to know that Artist & Craftsman Supply in Hillcrest stocks sheets of fancy, non-holiday-specific paper, with nary a fat, fictitious elf in sight! Hipsters have been known to pay upwards of $20/roll for fancy gift-wrap, a small price to pay for distancing yourself from the seething masses. Some people are in the market of making hipster-specific gift-wrap.

And yet, despite their reknowned upcycling skills, hipsters have yet to find a suitable use for old wrapping paper. With options ranging from “frame it like artwork” to “make party hats and confetti out of it,” the lame ways to repurpose gift-wrap pile up like plastic grocery bags, junk mail, and any of the other byproducts against which we pointlessly struggle. If any of you hipsters out there have a better use for old wrapping paper, send it to hipster@sandiegoreader.com. I shortcut the whole problem by wrapping gifts in newsprint.