A Beginner’s Guide to Wrapping Christmas Gifts (When You Hate Wrapping Christmas Gifts)
The Hate
You HATE wrapping Christmas gifts.
But you LOVE Christmas.
You love the finding and the giving and the beauty and the loving and the festive and the wonder and the miraculous of it all.
You love every Amazon truck and every box, and every Amazon driver who leaves a box at your doorstep.
You love the unboxing.
You love Silent Night playing softly in the background.
But you hate wrapping the gifts.
Hate with a capital H.
Hate like you hate chitlins and cod liver oil.
Hate like you hate getting caught in the rain after a fresh ‘do.
Hate like you hate your child’s soccer team that won’t stop winning back-to-back tournament games in double overtime with penalty kicks when it’s cold and windy outside.
There’s no doubt you hate it.
You must work hard to be happy for the people that were finished wrapping before Black Friday. Beautiful stuff, too. Themed. Tags color-coordinated by recipient.
Secretly, you really admire them, but you’re working through some raw emotions in the Christmas gift wrap space.
The Reason
You hate it because you’re awful at it.
You let it go until the last minute because you’re awful at it.
You’re actually one of the worst gift wrappers on the planet.
You think Christmas gift bags are the best things since the internet.
You hate when the fancy new air fryer won’t fit in a gift bag.
But now you’ve got to get your butt in gear because it’s December 23 and those gifts aren’t going to wrap themselves.
The Wrapping
So you sit awkwardly in your squeaky home office chair, bending over to unroll and fold the pretty paper around the first gift propped up at your feet.
You can’t find the scotch tape dispenser, even though you just had it.
You find it hiding underneath the unrolled wrapping paper.
You really wish you had the matte-finish scotch tape on hand instead of the transparent shiny stuff because it’s easier to deal with, but none of that is going to make you better. You just wish you had it.
You start cutting. You always cut too much or too little, and then you must come back in to recut, or retape, Frankenstein-style.
You’re finally done gift one. It’s tragic. You look for the biggest bow you can find to cover up the uneven wrap. The bow and the gift tag help, but you’re mostly thankful that you can place the worst side down against the tree skirt.
You repeat.
About two hours later, you’re all done wrapping the big gifts, and you plan multiple gift bags for the smaller items that remain.
You decide that will be a chore you can easily handle tomorrow.
The Reward
Celebrating the end of another painful present-wrapping season, you head to the car for a quick trip to the local Starbucks drive-thru.
The Problem
You discover the two bags of gifts you’d stashed in the backseat of your car for a few ladies on the Christmas decorating committee at the church. They’d outdone themselves this year, and you’d picked up some framed wall art pieces on sale that you knew they’d all enjoy.
Like the gifts that came before them, they would not be able to wrap themselves.
The Solution
You suddenly decide that all the decorating committee ladies should drink more coffee, and that Starbucks gift cards would truly help with that effort.
You gleefully head to the drive-thru now, fully freed from the gift-wrapping cloud of despair that so easily besets you every December 23.
A satisfactory smile forms as you realize what perfect future birthday presents those wall art pieces will make for the decorating committee.
Later on, you’ll have to add start shopping for the biggest birthday gift bags possible to your to-do list.