The One Roll Christmas

I love wrapping paper.   On second thought, I don’t love wrapping paper indiscriminately.  I love good wrapping paper.   It’s likely due to my love of origami and other paper crafts, but I always appreciate a good roll of paper.

Years ago, and even still today there was the great wrapper caper (I made that name up) in which it would appear you were purchasing yards and yards of paper because the physical dimensions of the five-roll package were so big.  You would get home, pull off the cellophane wrapper and remove the cardboard end-caps to discover each roll had about two presents-worth of paper wrapped around a large cardboard tube.    I got pretty good at feeling the heft of those multi-rolls in conjunction with squeezing the cylinders and could make an easy call on the total amount.

Then, and this was some years before I had children, that I found the wrapping paper motherlode.   Imagine my surprise when I go down a row at CostCo to discover rolls of good quality paper with nearly an inch of wound paper on the tube.   Then, picture me finding out these rolls were only $10.99.   I am most certain you can, if you know me at all, envision my cart full of every variety of paper they had.  

I still have a lot of that paper because I just don’t have hundreds of Christmas presents to wrap each year.    That point in time—I can’t remember how long ago it was—seemed to be a roll-to-value turning point.   Since then I’ve seen lots of paper rolls with measurable, meaningful quantity on them.   It doesn’t really matter though because I’ve put a kibosh on purchasing more paper until the current stock has been exhausted.    

Then I saw a roll I really liked.  Black mainly with silver, red and white ornaments that just called out to me, “you need to wrap everything with me.  Put me in your cart.  Do it now.”   I was powerless to resist and the roll came home with me.

I have followed instructions and have wrapped darned near everything with that roll of paper.   As of the 1st of December there are only a few presents that haven’t arrived or made that will need to be wrapped.  It’s going to be a one-roll Christmas and I am completely going to love the look of the presents under the tree.

The Big Boy Update:  While my daughter was having a play therapy session with her therapist my son and I went to get something at a store.   He talked me into a little container of Hershey’s Kisses.  After eating two in the car I told him, “I feel like I’m cheating on dinner.”  He asked me what that meant and I explained.   As we walked back into the therapist’s office he said to me, “I love cheating on dinner.”  The one lady in the waiting room couldn’t help but laugh when she heard him.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter feels very strongly how M&M’s is pronounced.   I tried to correct her today and she emphatically told me, “Mom, it’s in-uuh-MEN!”