Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Presents

A few years ago I started doing "themes" with my wrapping paper. Now it has become something of an obsession.

Add to this my unnatural love of paper of all sorts, not to mention designs - specifically Christmas designs - and what you end up with is an assortment of wrapping paper that could cover enough presents for a small army. OK, maybe a medium sized army.

The day after Christmas I turn into Robo-shopper. Considering how uninterested I am in shopping in general, this is somewhat amazing. But, I get up at dark-thirty and drive the half hour to Paducah, and wait in the cold outside whatever store, to make sure I get a good deal on something. I need a deal.

One of my finds last year was this paper. It has stars on it - one of my favorite motifs. Of course, this wasn't the only wrapping paper I bought last year. It seems each year I buy two or three designs, despite I'll only use one each year. You don't have to be a math whiz to see that this leads to lots of rolls of wrapping paper in my house. I'm always certain that I'll find something to go with something I bought years earlier that will make it a perfect combination. As of yet that has not happened, even though I've added at least a dozen rolls that were good contenders for that. But I remain optimistic.

In 1991 I started adding ornaments to packages for my family - with names and dates on them. Some years I made them and some years I just added that info to something I bought. This year I found these stars, which are the perfect match for the paper. You knew the ornament had to coordinate with the paper, didn't you? Surely you did.  Last year I had red paper with silver snowflakes on it and the ornaments were silver snowflakes. That was one of my best combos ever.

Then there are the ribbons and name tags to coordinate. For many years I just wrote names on the back of the presents with a sharpie because I didn't want anything to detract from the look. This year I bought two rolls of ribbon that were 100 feet each. That was almost enough to do all these presents. I had some other ribbon that I've used on a couple of them. How much ribbon it took to do all these presents was a question I was asked multiple times at the homes tour yesterday.

And I bet two dozen people asked me if the presents were real. Who has time to wrap empty boxes? I guess some people do. When I was thinking about the questions people might ask these were not ones I expected.


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