2 sleeps to go - Wrapping the presents...

It can’t be put off any longer, but it’s hard enough finding time to buy presents let alone wrap them. Mind you I do have a little helper, not so much an elf as a daughter. So this year I shall mainly just be writing tags.

I sometimes think of the wrapping paper of Christmas past. Well, I’m like that. The strangest things lodge in my memory. Years ago Christmas paper was so thin that it tore at the slightest tug. Often, with all the picking up and shaking, the Christmas presents were half on display by the time Christmas morning came. My gran was the worst wrapper (and I don’t mean Tupac) in the world, the presents hardly covered and sealed at all. No gift tags for her, she used to write on the paper in biro and often the tip of the pen would pierce the paper and go through to the hand-knitted jumper beneath. The designs of those papers were ghastly – horrible washed-out blue snowmen, grungy brown coaching scenes, garish emerald green holly, pink crinoline ladies… yuk.

By the time I had reached my rebellious teens I’d decided to forgo that tacky flimsy stuff in favour of brown paper, ceiling wax, and string. ‘How very traditional’ I thought at the time. In the eighties it was all shiny foils and exuberant swashes of lacy ribbon, the nineties brought gold foil boxes and present bags.

I don’t know when it happened but at some point that wafer-thin paper disappeared and Christmas wrapping paper got much thicker. The designs improved too. No more black and yellow lanterns, sickly yellow pink-flamed candles; or those bloody American cardinal birds. Christmas paper was suddenly quite nice to look at and not the eyesore I remember from my childhood. Perhaps it was the advent of the poundshops and cheap imported gift wrap, or maybe it was the paper making process itself. Either way, all at once you could wrap a present without the risk of the death of a thousand tears occurring as you wrapped.

The sticky tape didn’t improve though. If anything it got worse and thinner. I often wonder how many days I’ve wasted fruitlessly searching for the end of the roll only to give up and start another. It could be days, weeks even. My house is littered with rolls of half-used tape.

There was a time that present wrapping was a joy. I used to take such care matching the paper to the pom-pom, pondering the message that I would write on each carefully chosen gift tag, teasing bows and flourishes out of the rolls of many coloured ribbon. These days it’s become something of a chore and I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve sat up on Christmas Eve wrapping presents until the ends of my fingers ached.

In reality all that frustration, cost and time we spend wrapping presents, just so the paper can be hastily torn off and then thrown away, is a nonsense. But then, I’m no fan of reality and a real lover of nonsense. After all, a present really isn’t a present until it’s been wrapped.