Jackie Wells-Fauth
I have always loved shopping for Christmas presents. Even with all my complaints about having to shop online, I still love accumulating that little pile of loot, ready to distribute to family and friends.
Except the longer I look at it and the more the pile grows, the more I begin to dread it. Not the gifts, just the next step: wrapping all those things. Because as much as I love shopping for the perfect gifts or making things I know they will love, I hate wrapping them!
I usually end up playing the “ignore” game. First, I pass by the small stack of things on the table. After a time, I move the growing heap to a spot on the floor. When Roy kicks the bigger things across the room, he usually inquires, “Time to wrap the presents, is it?”
The message is not subtle: he wants the gifts wrapped under the tree, but unfortunately, he is actually worse at wrapping them than I am. I once caught him leaving the house with a gift for his father, tied up in a ratty looking grocery bag.
“What is that?” I said, thinking that I already knew.
“It’s Dad’s gift; it was hard to wrap, and I didn’t find any of those gift bag things, so this will work,” was his answer.
“Couldn’t you at least have put on a name tag and a bow or something?” I wondered how to get it away from him to properly wrap.
“I couldn’t make a bow stick,” he said, holding it well out of my reach. “And it doesn’t need a name tag. He’ll know it’s from me.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I murmured as we left for the Christmas celebration.
As much as I don’t admire the way he wraps things, he is equally unflattering in his observations on my work. My wrapped gifts generally look like they have been viciously attacked by a drunken Christmas monster and they lost!
“Where are the scissors?” I exclaim, pulling out my hair as I search out the location of the scissors. “I swear, they walk away. Roy, can you go get me another pair of scissors?”
“Okay,” he says helpfully, “but that was the fourth and final pair out of the sewing stand. You’re going to have to make do with the kitchen shears.”
“That’s fine,” I agree eagerly, “if they can cut up a chicken, they should be able to cut this thin Christmas wrap.”
Roy brought me the shears and stood and watched me estimating where to cut and then shoving those oversized scissors into the very thin paper.
“Why are you cutting it?” he finally asked. “You could do as neatly as that if you chewed it.”
“I’m not going to chew the paper apart!” I was indignant. “How could you think that?”
“Because that’s what everyone else is going to think when they see the drunken edges on their gifts,” Having delivered his opinion, he left me in peace to ruin my gifts as I wished.
I lost the tape about 15 times, cut every piece of paper either too small, so I had to piece in extra to at least cover what was in it; or I cut it too large, and having no wish to try and chew off the excess paper, I simply wadded it up and tacked it down with extra tape—when I could find it.
In my family, my younger daughter Tracie is the one who got the neat wrapping gene. She is able to eye and cut (with reasonable scissors) a piece of paper that fits the gift exactly. She neatly folds the ends (also the right size) and uses the exact amount of tape needed to hold it in place. Watching her do this always makes me wonder if they somehow switched her with my actual daughter at the hospital and as she is untwisting, untaping and unwrapping the paper which goes three times around the gift, I know she wonders the same thing.
Well, another year is winding down and so I have taken the plunge and managed to wrap all the gifts and only one of them ended up in a garbage bag—but I put a bow on it. I’ll spend the next year rounding up all the scissors I lost and the tape dispensers that disappeared, and I will breathe a sigh of relief: for better or worse, “that’s a wrap.”
dropsinthewell 