Y’all, I’m a pathetic gift wrapper. With a capital P. Give me a perfectly square or rectangular box, and I’ll find a way to make it look lumpy and bumpy and have grooves and curves like a country road through the mountains. You can show me how to wrap, teaching me the tricks to smooth seams and store-quality lines and tightness, and I’ll still produce something straight out of Whoville in the end.
Things really get ugly when I try to wrap something creatively. The best I have ever done was to use various size boxes and put them inside each other along the way. That has been fun. One year I bought Diane tickets for us to see Broadway’s Lion King. I bought a stuffed Mickey Mouse and had him holding the tickets. This required taping his hands around the tickets because he would not cooperate and truly hold them for me. He went inside box number 1, and then I added several boxes, slightly bigger, pathetically wrapped, until it was all one big box. That was fun. She loved it. She loved the Lion King, not the where-the-hell-is-my-gift adventure.
Another year I had bought Diane a set of pots and pans (exactly what she told me to get because, duh) and I decided to be creative. I got an old, empty box and put the new pans in them. Then I took the box that the new ones came in and put all kinds of things in it from our kitchen and elsewhere. A pan, a wooden spoon, some tools, a sock, pretty much anything I could find, and wrapped them all to put inside this box of new pots and pans. I made sure that she opened it before the old box with the good stuff in it. With each thing she unwrapped, I kept saying, “Hey, I’ve been looking for that.” She didn’t like that adventure either. I thought I was cute. She used a different word(s). But she did enjoy the new pots and pans once they were revealed. It was a good save, mostly...ok, partially.
Of all the things on her list this year, she wanted an umbrella. You know what’s coming. Someone who has no business wrapping a tube of wrapping paper had an idea. I opened the umbrella and tried to see if I could wrap it like that. This was a learning experience. Don’t buy wrapping paper for such a project that cost more than 23-cent a tube because you’re going to waste it and throw it away.
Did you know that scotch tape does not stick to umbrella materials? I know now. I’m also out of tape now. I had this great idea of laying out several sheets of wrapping paper that I could put the open umbrella top-down onto, then figure out how to fold it over the edges somehow and tape it on the inside so it would look like a wrapped umbrella.
This produced a series of lessons.
First lesson - that’s a lot of paper!
Second lesson - trying to cut wrapping paper into awkwardly shaped strips for this is no easy task, especially when I picked a pair of scissors that apparently were last used to cut sandpaper with fresh glue on it.
Third lesson - scotch tape does not, oh, I already shared that.
Fourth lesson - I didn’t know the third lesson until I had cut and carefully laid out and taped together all of the other strips and laid them out for the next phase of this masterpiece I was creating. This involved the whole tube that I had bought for this plus the end of some other tube we had and a fair amount from a bigger tube that was sitting in the corner asking to be wasted.
Fifth lesson - turning an embrella upside down to wrap doesn’t work well. You have to break it to make it lay flat enough to cooperate.
Sixth lesson - the whole strip idea was a total failure in planning, implementing, and any other “ing” word you choose to insert here.
Seventh lesson - the visual I had in my mind of what this should look like is still in my mind, but the umbrella was folded back down and simply rolled in one of the sheets that were not torn in lessons 1-6. Even that didn’t work well, but I was ready for a second glass of wine by then and was about out of tape and didn’t care.
Eighth lesson - this was simultaneously a genius and idiotic idea.
Ninth lesson - at least I didn’t try something stupid like putting a bunch of old stuff into a “new” box and disappointing her before surprising her with the actual gift.
Which brings us to the best lesson of all - I’m still a crappy wrapper, but Diane didn’t know what she almost encountered until reading this blog post, and that’s a big win for me!