Still an old-school wrapper
Raise your hand if you still wrap Christmas presents.
Thought so. I think I’m one of the few hangers-on and tapers-up who still put wrapping paper around gifts.
The rest of you do the easy thing and stuff the goodies into gift bags. When the bag trend first started a few decades ago, it was charming. There was something enticing about receiving a pretty, square-bottom bag with a tuft of tissue paper blooming from the top.
But I still think it’s better to accept a wrapped box, shake it, hold it up to your ear, and then dig in.
The unwrapping I like; the wrapping? Hate it.
Back when the kids were younger and there were a lot of presents to wrap, I left the task until very late Christmas Eve. There I would sit, with Ralphie and his BB gun playing on the TV, trying to judge how much paper I’d need to cover a box without leaving a gap.
The first five packages were works of art, their corners crisply tucked and their tops festooned with coordinating bows. By gifts 9 and 10, the wrapping was lumpy and each box was lucky to get one of those ugly stick-on bows.
The task was made more exhausting by a couple of quirks of the physical laws of nature. The first is that each time you lay your scissors down, they will migrate from the table space near your right hand to a distant place that defies explanation. You will lose time hunting for them. The second quirk involves the Scotch tape, which will remove itself from the teethy part of the dispenser and reattach itself to the roll, forcing you to spin the roll 30 times trying to find the beginning part and then picking at it to pull it forward again. You will have no fingernails left for this task, having chewed them off from all the stress.
That was the scene at my house this week. Vowing to avoid the whole Christmas Eve wrapping marathon, I started early. Those discount stores are great places to buy wrapping paper and ribbons. There are aisles and aisles of the stuff on display; I wandered around for the better part of an hour finding the right combination of paper and ribbon. I was feeling festive.
There are two kinds of wrapping paper: the thick kind that comes on wide rolls and the thin kind that comes on skinny rolls. The skinny ones cost about a penny for a thousand rolls, but they are to be avoided. The paper is so thin if it weren’t so colorful it could pass for toilet paper. Wrap a stuffed bunny in that paper and the ears will poke through.
I settled on two big rolls, both nice thick paper with an old-farmhouse vibe, and added some wide, velvety ribbon.
It was the best wrapping job I’d ever done, like something on Pinterest.
But all was not well in Bethie’s Christmas land. While I slept, the packages opened themselves. I walked into the room to find that on half the packages, the tape unstuck itself from the paper, causing the folded ends to fling open like a Chinese food take-home box.
Turns out tape doesn’t really stick to expensive, thick paper. Whatever it is that makes the paper nice and hefty also repels tape. To repair this will require the big packaging tape, and you know what that’s like getting the roll started.
I think it’s time for some gift bags.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.