People who say I am wrapped in festive season may well be right.
For now comes my yearly testing time, the simple yet, to me, infinitely difficult and almost hopeless task of wrapping presents.
People know when they receive my presents. They know by the wrinkled paper and the ugly turned edges with the make-do tape.
I am an unbeautiful wrapper.
I would be only too happy to leave it all to the dexterity of shop people, to those fair, firm fingers flying over the surfaces and leaving everything smooth and shapely.
But we have this foolish tradition in our family that you wrap your own. Why do I think (I am told by members of another sex), why do I think, knucklehead, that they have been saving and smoothing pressing and hoarding, grouping and stockpiling coloured paper from presents received last year.
Not merely to save me money, only goodness knows I don’t deserve it, but to bring the personal touch.
Wrapping one’s own gives it intimacy, one is involved; one draws closer to the receiver. And one goes through hell with transparent tape and cranky ribbon.
We are in the midst of the wrapping rite right now.
Last night I was frogmarched into the sitting room where my daughter sat among a technicoloured nightmare of paper as the harsh command rang in my sensitive ears, “Start wrapping.”
I’m better at wrapping rectangular objects than I am presents with odd bulges and shapes.
I soon became embroiled in wrapping an improbable creature that looked like a dinosaur but was in reality a mutated woollen kangaroo.
I wrapped its face but its tail baffled me. It was, of course, for a dear grandchild who, I suspect, will only use it as a weapon to mug some weaker tot.
Well, I was working around this tail bit, lashing it with silver paper, string and a safety pin when the Head Wrapper came up and rapped me sharply on the knuckles.
She cried, “Man, you must disguise the present. Everyone knows this is a kangaroo The child must be mystified and intrigued, frantically opening the mysterious prize with tingling fingers. So find a box, Fat Fingers, and start again.”
It was then I went into cardboard. Cardboard is like hand- ling the keel of Australia II. It has a habit of slitting your hand between thumb and forefinger.
I constructed a kind of card board container, sagging but certainly mysterious.
“What’s THAT?” shrieked the Head Wrapper.
“It’s my kangaroo enclosure,” – I said defensively.
“Stand back,” she shrieked and banished me to handkerchiefs which were in a flat box. Sheets of coloured covering were flung at me.
But I got into trouble again. First I found I had cut the paper to an oblong instead of a square. I strained and taped but the handkerchiefs winked from a corner of the paper.
Blow it, I muttered. But then again it wasn’t the present, it was the thought behind the sniff.
She didn’t think so..
“It must be a surprise,” said the Head Wrapper, who was asking for something to be wrapped around her head.
Start again.
So she put me on to wrapping a book. I did this very skilfully using an oven bag and I tied it proudly with a sweet ribbon.
“But,” said the Head Wrapper, the book is visible in that plastic wrapping. What do you call that, in heaven’s name?
“I call it a see-through browse,” I cried
Nobody laughed
Well, the night went its crackling, papery way. I wrapped a pair of condiment containers and bumbled my way through a couple of home-made preserves that would make a Molotov cocktail look like a milkshake. I shrouded them in wildly improbable heliotrope paper with slyly spaced rubber rings while saying a silent prayer for the stomachs for which they were intended
I also tried putting binder twine around a micro-oven, which I was unsteadily concealing from its future recipient who had chosen it, inspected it, ordered it and then said I could. surprise her with it.
But even that gave me trouble. You know the saying:
East is East and West is West. and never the twine shall meet.
So if you get a lopsided paper parcel from me this year, thank your stars you’re getting one at all. So what if it is tied with old string? Everything’s got strings attached these days, don’t you know?
Although, come to think of it, we could do with a little more wrapport.
By MAX FATCHEN