Reminders to self: what not to do: Christmas wrap

[mrissa]

Dear self:

You tend to forget these things. Here is a list of what to remember. Not necessarily applicable to other people. Just you, self. Just you.

1. Make people who give you things in Christmas bags take the Christmas bags back again after you have opened them if at all possible. They like using them! You have no objection to getting them but hate using them! Win win! (1a. Find something to do with the stack of Christmas bags in the closet.)

2. Do not buy green wrapping paper. Really. You love green. I know. And some of the Christmas stuff is a beautiful deep dark green that looks great in the store. But when you, yes, you, self, imagine it under the green Christmas tree, you will invariably be disappointed at how it blends in rather than lending a festive hue. You will not reach for the green wrapping paper. The green wrapping paper will be with you always. Do not buy more.

3. Do not buy the giant rolls of wrapping paper. I know, they are economical, and you feel thrifty and pleased, and sometimes they have quite lovely patterns. But I know you. After the fourth year of taking out the same roll of quite lovely dark red with white snowflakes, it will appear dingy and sad from its sojourn in the closet, and you will feel dingy and sad. Don’t do it. Wrap in brown paper if you want to be economical; it will make you feel old-fashioned as well as thrifty. But mostly economize elsewhere and buy the only moderately giant rolls of wrapping paper.

4. There is a reason that toddler-Moo thought that “sparkly” and “sprinkly” were the same word. The shiny sparkly paper will give you sparkly carpet, sparkly sweaters, sparkly smudges on your forehead. Leave it in the store to sparkle there.

5. Make sure–no, really really sure–no, check again–that the shiny paper you have selected is not made of mylar. Even your mother, who objects pretty firmly to religiously-based swearing on religious grounds, has been heard to refer softly to the one remaining roll as “that damned mylar.” It is damned stuff, it is damnable stuff, and you are wrapping presents, not filling balloons. Check again to make sure. They may not have to tell the truth about whether things actually contain blueberries in this country, but they are not allowed to lie about mylar wrapping paper, so Upton Sinclair did not live and die in vain.

Just trying to look out for you, self.

Love,

me

Originally published at Novel Gazing Redux

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

There should be an Exchange for buyers of Interminably Large Rolls of Christmas Paper. After a season or two, you could swap with someone else. I think last year was the last for "gold background with colorful stockings" which I think we have suffered with for 6 or 7 years.

K.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That is an excellent idea. At the moment I have three such rolls, all at least four years old, all snowflake themed (red, green, and blue). I would gladly trade them with someone who hadn't been looking at them four years in a row.

[carbonel]

I am on the last dregs of a giant roll of paper with bells and birds on it, and am slightly regretful about it, because it was pretty damned close to my perfect holiday paper. It evoked a holiday feeling without being specific to any holiday.

On the other hand, I have no idea how the roll of mostly transparent mylar wrapping paper ended up in the closet. The only way it will be at all useful is if I wrap the present first in something opaque like tissue paper. Plus, of course, the unwieldiness of mylar.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If you are like me, the mostly transparent mylar was packaged so that it looked to the casual observer like silver or some other shiny color. And then no. Stupid packaging.

[tesla-aldrich.livejournal.com]

I see a solution: the transparent shiny stuff becomes useful (and mostly opaque) when you scrunch it up into decorative disarray and use it to cover things in gift bags - of which Mris clearly has too many.

[redbird]

The green wrapping paper isn't wrong, just out of context: but of course this month you're buying paper for Christmas presents, not birthday or graduation or father's day presents.

I loved the bit about Upton Sinclair, and am resisting the urge to go to fda.gov and search for "mylar" because I'm worried about what might turn up.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, the thing about the green wrapping papers is that I actually mean green Christmas paper. The stuff I have right now in great abundance is dark green with even darker green snowflakes--which would look awfully festive to me on a birthday present, but for most people it would look incongruous--it would say, "hello, I went to wrap your present and was out of everything but Christmas wrap and the Hello Kitty paper we keep for Lillian." If it was just plain green or even a nice stripe (glitter-free!), I would just save it for later and may in fact do so if some turns up when I'm at the store buying more Christmas wrap.

[redbird]

To me, again, it would look festive. Green-on-green Santas would say "Christmas," green-on-green snowflakes would say "Mrissa likes winter" (which is not news). But I suspect you're right that we are the minority here, and that there's no good way of knowing who is in which group.

[finnyb.livejournal.com]

I, too, would love that snowflake paper at any time of year. Or any snowflake paper.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

We tend towards using the free wrapping paper that various charities send to us. Since this is usually Nature Conservancy and the like, our family and friends get festive chickadee, cardinal and occasionally panda wrapping paper on their presents.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That sounds lovely. I would use that eagerly.

...I should remember to save the Medecins Sans Frontiers maps and use them as wrapping paper.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I have made that mistake with mylar too.

Once, and I mean once, there was a man in the street in Lancaster, and this must have been the Christmas of 1993 when Z was three, and the man in the street was selling 10 big flat sheets of foil paper for a pound. And we bought lots and lots and lots, red and blue and gold and silver and green and more blue and more gold, and I used them for several years and they folded so well and were so perfect under the tree (even the green ones, because I put gold bows on them) that I have been slightly disappointed in all my wrapping paper ever since, and falling into these traps of shiny and mylar and so on.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think I know the weight of foil paper you mean, and it's lovely stuff, and I can see why you would yearn for it ever after.

[tesla-aldrich.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the giggles!

Among many other debacles, you reminded me of a status I posted on Facebook last year:

"Apologies in advance to everyone that I see over the next several days: when I bought the wrapping paper I could have sworn that it merely had the glitter pattern *printed* on instead of being composed of millions of tiny particles of stripper dust that would follow me everywhere for weeks."

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I made the mistake, nigh on a decade ago now, of buying a Very Large Roll of paper with dark green and light green diamonds on it, on the theory that it would do for either Christmas or birthdays. Within a year the kids were complaining about that ugly wrapping paper (so of course I couldn't use it on very many presents at a time), and every year since it's been greeted with cries of "Do we still have that paper?" I think this Christmas will see the last of it (my son, deputed to wrap presents for my recent birthday, gleefully used it for me and said there was still a bit left).

[blue-hat-guru.livejournal.com]

Not having worked with mylar wrapping yet, thank you for the warning.