I HATE Xmas Wrapping – The Climb #670

Wednesday 23^rd December 2020

If there’s one area of Xmas that I have always hated it’s wrapping. I love deciding on gifts, hunting them down and seeing people’s faces when they open them… but the actual wrapping them? Urgh!

This isn’t a new phobia. It’s something that I’ve openly said for years.

It’s not that I am bad at wrapping either. I tend to use a little too much paper and it ends up looking a little messy once the edges are folded in as a result, but other than that I’m not sure people would moan about it.

It’s the physical act of wrapping I hate. First you have to unroll enough paper. This means going around and getting a rough idea whether the paper will cover the gift. The reason I tend to use a little too much paper is that I err on the side of caution. There were times when I was a boy where I’d wrap only to find the paper didn’t quite meet once folded in. Cue, scraps of paper taped to the side to cover the gaps.

Then there’s the tape. I vary the length of tape I use, from a long strip when first joining ends together, to small pieces for tape down corner folds. But if you take a long piece, it will try and outfox you and curl in on itself, leading to the tape being wasted because it’s attached to itself. Or you take a small piece, put the roll of Sellotape down and in doing so manage to lose your end. And do I hate, as a person without nails, trying to find and lift the end of the tape.

And then there are round gifts. It’s impossible to wrap those without them looking like you’ve just scrunched up a load of wrapping paper and liberally applied tape to it in some uncoordinated fashion.

I hate round gifts so much that I made a point of buying extended family books each year rather than sweets or biscuits because books are square and about the right size to easily wrap. In the event of a round gift, I’ve been buying gift bags rather than risk the turmoil of trying to wrap it.

However, this year, the few gifts I bought were neither square or small enough to fit into a cheap gift bag.

So I got creative.

I’ve had a few deliveries the past couple of weeks, and – long story – I still have the boxes. Or rather I did, because I used them all to put gifts in before wrapping the box. This of course meant more Sellotape and more lost ends.

For a small xmas, there still seemed to be an awful lot of wrapping, and it took a good chunk of the day. I cursed at numerous times during the wrapping, including once when a long piece of Sellotape went rouge, attached itself to the bits I’d taped off and tore a huge chunk of gift wrap away as I tried to tug it back.

I hate wrapping. I really, really do. It makes me glad that Xmas is only once a year.