how not to wrap christmas presents

Travis took all three kids to bible study on Sunday night, leaving me home alone to do whatever I pleased.

Naturally, I chose to wrap 30-some-odd, crazy-shaped Christmas presents.

Moms have all the fun.

I remember as a little girl looking at the presents my Mamaw Dot wrapped and thinking they were the prettiest things I’d ever seen.  Crisp, clean folds with patterns that matched up perfectly at the seams.  No tape.  The woman could wrap a present with no tape (or at least that’s how it looked – perhaps she used her wizardry to turn the tape invisible; perhaps she used that same wizardry to make her buttermilk biscuits because I have the recipe and mine taste nothing like hers).  You almost didn’t want to open the gifts she gave because tearing into that present meant destroying a piece of artwork.  I’m not ridiculous or anything so I DID tear into her gifts…but I gave it at least 5 seconds of thoughtful kid admiration before doing so.

Fast forward to Sunday night’s gift wrapping session (which is indicative of my entire adult present wrapping career) and I found myself sitting in our bedroom floor, wondering why the heck I don’t just farm this job out to someone else.  Surely there’s a service or a Groupon or something.  Surely I could just conjure up some wizardry skills that my Mamaw passed down through the bloodline.

But no.

I am left with the task and I am bad at the task.  So like with most things in life, I just close my eyes and go for it, hoping everything will turn out ok.  And it always does.  Because people don’t care about gift wrapping, not really.  They’re all too busy worrying about their own gift wrapping.

That’s what I tell myself at least.

splendid…lindsay