I Want Christmas, Continued Again

The Art of Opening Gifts

Like all arts, gift wrapping requires concentration, dedication and talent.  Most of us don’t have that much talent for making something immortal out of fancy colored paper, ribbon and Scotch tape.  Concentration and dedication are not even considered, because we just want to get the whole thing over so we can get on with something more fun, such as watching Christmas movies on Lifetime or eating a lot of cookies.

The other popular Christmas art is opening gifts.  Different people have different techniques for peeling off the layers of paper and ribbon and revealing whatever treasure or dreck is inside.

(A)                There is one adult female in every family who sits and looks at a wrapped present and says, “It’s so pretty, I hate to open it.”  Her lack of perspective concerning what is important (the present inside the wrapping) and what is not important (the wrapping) and her hesitance to get on with it make everyone else want to pick her up and shake her like a rattle.

When she is finally persuaded to disturb the wrapping, and find out what she is getting, she VERY slowly and VERY carefully, with great reverence, frees the gift of, first, the ribbon, then the paper.  This gives her time to form a plan of how she is going to react if the present inside is something she must hide in a closet or re-gift to someone she hates.

(B)                I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have never seen a man act like (A) above.  Men usually prefer to rip the damned paper open as fast as possible to see if, this year, they lucked out and are getting something good for a change.  There is still a certain art involved.  A man can either rip open a gift with great <i>élan</i> or with great disinterest, knowing he is probably getting cologne, aftershave or a tie for the fourteenth year in a row.

(C)                Women who are more impatient than (A) above – in other words, the rest of us – usually take reasonable precautions not to tear the wrapping too much while trying to get at whatever is inside.  We were brainwashed by our mothers to save used Christmas wrap from one year to another, and we still have Mom’s voice deep in our psyches.  That is the Voice of Christmas Past, and it never goes away.

(D)               Some gifts, such as a new Harley, are too big to be wrapped.  In that case, nobody has to open anything.  They just have to figure out how to get the thing out of the living room.  This takes half the fun out of getting a present, but it saves paper.

(E)                Many families have a joker who loves to put a small sized gift into a large box with a lot of stuffing to take up the extra space.  I used to be one of those jokers, until I grew up.  This provides endless fun to everyone except the recipient when the gift is opened.  If an adult pulls this trick on another adult, the present had better be something spectacular, if the gift giver knows what’s good for him.

(F)                Kids are not concerned about such mundane things as wrapping paper.  If they are left to their own devices, they will have pieces of mutilated gift wrapping all over the living room floor by the time they get through opening their presents.  Mom is usually watching, though, and making sure that enough re-usable paper survives the yearly paper holocaust, to be used again the following year.  She learned this from HER Mom, who learned it from HER Mom, who learned it from HER Mom, who survived the Great Depression.

The Original Family Gift Wrapping Saver

 Giving gifts to our loved ones and beautiful Christmas memories to our children are wonderful things.

The Ten Best Uses for an Unwanted Fruitcake

Judging from some of the reactions I have seen, the majority of the human race in the Western World either hates fruitcake or thinks it hates fruitcake.  In the meantime, the giving of fruitcake is a Christmas tradition that goes back many centuries.  Such venerable customs are hard to stop, so most of us are exposed to fruitcake during the holiday season.  Those of us who like it (including this author) are thrilled.  Others are not.  Here are some ideas of what to do if you hate the stuff but someone sends it to you, anyway.

10.  Cut the cake into pieces, let the pieces harden to the consistency of large gemstones, paint them in bright neon colors and use them as paperweights.

9.  Leave the cake in the cupboard until it hardens to the point where it could break bones.  Use it as a decorative holiday doorstop.  You can cover it with pottery glaze if you want, but why bother?

8.  Use it for discus throwing practice.  Of course, this only works for the round-shaped cakes.  The rectangular ones can be used to play fetch with the dog.

7.  Re-gift it to that obnoxious cousin who borrowed your laptop and returned it with twenty different pieces of malware on it.

6.  Did you ever see the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding?  Remember the engagement party scene?  Well, a round fruitcake makes a lovely centerpiece when you stick a plant in the middle of it.

5.  Extract all the liquor from it and use the rest of it as mulch.  You probably don’t know how to extract the liquor, but the very act of trying to do this will give you many hours of holiday fun, especially if you are sampling a nice bottle of Kentucky Bourbon at the same time.

4.  Donate it to the office Christmas party.  When half your co-workers are too drunk to know the difference, offer it to them and tell them it’s chocolate.  After Christmas, tell them what they really ate.  You can all have a good laugh.

3.  Mash it into a powdery mess and add it to the cat’s litter.  Warning:  this might cause the cat to go on a litter box strike.  Just saying.

2.  Cut it into small pieces and put each piece between two chocolate chip cookies.  Feed them to the kids, telling them it’s a new kind of Oreo.  Kids eat grass and paper.  They will be sure to eat these.

1. Eat it!  It’s good!  Really, it is!  Would I steer you wrong?  Just add whipped cream.

Gift Wrapping Made Complicated

The identity of whoever invented gift wrap has been lost in the alleys and gutters of time, so we have no way of knowing who to blame.  It was probably the same person who instituted the “do not open until Christmas” rule that torments people to this day.

People react differently to gift wrap:

Uncle Mario tears paper, ribbon and bows into mangled shreds with one deft hand movement, then tosses it all onto the floor.  You want to punch him out, because, dammit, that wrapping was a work of art until he played Demolition Derby with it.

Aunt Josephine, on the other hand, sits holding her present and says, “Oh my!  This is so pretty I hate to take it apart.”  You want to punch her out because, dammit, you bought that present and you deserve to get an ecstatic reaction from her when she sees it, which will not happen as long as she sits there holding it like a moron.  She then takes an eternity to open it, carefully making sure she doesn’t tear any of that pretty paper, which she folds up neat and tidy before she finally gets around to her gift.**

Kids are never going to be careful with wrapping paper unless they have been trained to recycle it from year to year.  This was traditional in our family.  We had pieces of gift wrap that were family heirlooms.

No matter how hard I try, I can’t get gift wrap to look right.  Something always ends up lopsided or bunched up, too short or too big.  And those are with boxed gifts, books and other things which should be easy.  You don’t want to look at anything else I have wrapped, unless you want a good laugh.  Some things should be left up to professionals.

It always starts out well.  I gather together the present (hopefully in a box, if it isn’t a book), the paper, the ribbon and a pair of scissors.  I clear a space on the table and settle down to work.

My cat sees something interesting about to happen and immediately jumps onto the table and starts to play with the paper.  I pick her up and put her on the floor.   She jumps back up onto the table, swats at me and starts to play with the ribbon.  I put her on the floor again.  This continues until I finally pick her up, put her in the bathroom and close the door.

With the four-footed paper shredder temporarily out of the way, I place the present on the paper and try to figure out how much it will take to cover the whole thing.  I am allergic to the idea of measuring.  I can’t be bothered.  So I eyeball it.  I am also allergic to drawing straight lines to use for cutting, so I just take the scissors and try to cut in a straight line without having a straight line to cut on.  It comes out lopsided and slightly too short.  I remedy this by cutting a small piece of paper, taping it to the exposed end of the box and then finishing with a lot of folding and application of Scotch “invisible” tape, which isn’t as invisible as it says it is.

I look for a stick-on bow to cover the resulting messy spot, but the only one that is the right size is in a color that clashes with the paper.  I decide to call on the one gift wrapping skill at which I am an expert:  curling ribbon.  I curl enough ribbon to cover my less than stellar work with the paper.  This makes the present look like a rag doll without a face, but it’s kind of cute, so I let it go.

I put the wrapped present in the closet and let the cat out of the bathroom.  She gives me a dirty look, swats me and gives me a cold shoulder for about fifteen minutes, at which point she commences to rub against me, purr and nudge me with her nose to remind me that it’s her dinner time.

 

**Aunt Josephine once tried to fold a pair of Uncle Mario’s pajamas while he was still wearing them.  Their sex life improved dramatically that night.