Gifts You Can’t Wrap

Today was the start of my wrap-a-palazzo.  I don’t know why I wait so late to start wrapping; I’ve had most of my gifts for months.  This is the day I discover that I have bought too many gifts for one person and not enough for another.  So the gift rebalancing must happen.

Rebalancing is not that hard when you have a family made up mainly of girls.  The only problem comes in the monogrammed, personalized area.  I guess I could always save a gift for another year, but that certainly would mean that I could forget about that gift all together and find it in April three years later.  So everyone is getting all the gifts that I intended to give him or her.

Wrapping is something I am torn about.  No pun intended there.  I love to create a beautiful package, but I don’t want my box, paper, ribbon, tag and any possible ornamentation to be worth more than the gift inside.  I also hate to throw away all those beautiful ribbons.

I know this love of a beautifully wrapped gift came from my maternal Grandmother Mima.  Every year the most gorgeous presents would arrive at our Connecticut home all the way from Knoxville, Tennessee.  Each gift looked completely different from the next and all were works of art that even Martha Stewart could learn from.

I am in no way worthy to be in Mima’s league.  I normally have a color theme and only use a couple of papers but lots of different ribbons, but everything must coordinate.  Ribbons are my real passion.  I absolutely will not confess to how many ribbons I have, but I probably don’t need to ever in my whole life purchase another ribbon, but don’t hold me to that.

The funniest thing about my love of a beautifully wrapped gift is that I really don’t want any wrapped gifts myself.  The only things I want (besides needlepoint gift certificates) are experiences to share with loved ones.  OK, I take that back, there is one thing — a magical redo of my closets where all my summer shoes were taken out and all my winter shoes were reorganized as well as all my summer and winter clothes which were organized by size, type and color.  This is a gift I probably can only give myself so I wish that I was Jeannie from I Dream of Jeannie and I could just blink and with the flip of my pony tail my closets were done, that and I had Barbara Eden’s body.

While I am Jeannie I also wish that hunger could be ended and everyone had good job opportunities, that people were tolerant of the way other’s were born and let’s throw in world peace.   See those things could never be wrapped because no wrapping on earth would ever be worthy of making a happier world.