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December 20, 2004
Gift Wrapped
It seems that the women in my family have a skill that we men lack: the ability to wrap gifts. All it takes is a quick glance under our Christmas tree to determine which gifts were wrapped by which gender. Gifts from my mom and sister are perfect cubes and rectangular prisms, tightly wrapped in coloured paper, sometimes adorned with ribbons or hand-tied bows. Gifts from my brother, dad and myself, however, are much less… geometrical.
I’ve always had trouble getting the corners wrapped in perfect right angles, so all my gifts look like overstuffed pillows, with pointy, empty corners. I try to do a good job, but by the third present, I’ve lost patience and am satisfied that the box’s label is at least covered. I have to make a better effort to wrap my mom’s gifts first, to spare her the shame of her son’s poor wrapping. If my wrapping job is particularly disappointing, I usually adorn the gift with stick-on bows, or extra-large Love Chris labels, to try to detract from the half-roll of tape used to hold the thing together.
As bad as my wrapping abilities are, I’m a pro compared to my brother. He has an environmentally-conscious habit of using up all the useless scraps of wrapping paper. As commendable as that sounds, taping them directly to the gifts themselves doesn’t usually make for pretty presents. I remember one year he must have lost patience and used an entire roll of paper on one gift, twisting the ends so it looked like a giant hard candy, the kind you get at restaurants with your bill. By the time the two of us are done, there is no Scotch tape left in the house.
I don’t ever remember seeing any gifts wrapped by my father. He’s a fan of surprising us with unwrapped gifts that materialize Christmas morning at the foot of the tree, in front of the wrapped gifts. I think he likes seeing our immediate reactions. One year he tried to be a little different, and we woke up to three large boxes in black garbage bags, neatly tied at the top, which each of our names on them. I thought Santa had made a terrible mistake and that our gifts were actually out on the curb.
I think the greatest Christmas development in our household was the rise in popularity of gift bags. Requiring only that one places the gift inside the bag, then cover the top of the gift with tissue paper, this has become my favourite way to present gifts. Gifts from me are now almost exclusively given in bags. With exerting a mere fraction of the effort (and frustration) I put into wrapping presents, I can place my gift bags under the tree with pride next to my sister’s perfect cubes and my mother’s tetrahedrons.