Confessions of a Failed Gift Wrapper

I am the worst gift wrapper in the world. Most of my gifts are wrapped in pieced-together paper. My excuse is that I am recycling scraps of wrapping, but the truth is I just have a habit of underestimating the amount of paper needed.

My husband is a gift wrapping master. I think it has to do with his engineer brain. That meticulous, patient, visual-spatial brain that allows him to spend hours staring at computer code also transforms him into the Martha Stewart of gift wrapping at Christmas time.

"Look at the fancy design I made with this ribbon," Dan says proudly, holding up a perfectly wrapped present, topped with a cutely looped red bow.

I admire his work and smile at him encouragingly, thankful that he has so eagerly completed this task which means there is one less item on my holiday to-do list.

Dan and I barely made it through our first Christmas together as husband and wife before he started taking on all of the gift-wrapping assignments. Whenever we have to wrap gifts for family or friends, Dan immediately volunteers his talents before I can even offer.

His gifts are the only gifts I am permitted to wrap anymore. A typical Christmas morning finds Dan examining his presents from me - the wrinkled paper, the scraps of jagged wrapping on those troublesome ends that have to be folded up like a paper airplane (I was never very good at making those either), the gobs of tape with bits of hair and rug debris stuck to the bottom.

"That looks pretty good this time . . ." he says, furrowing his brow.

Not only am I the worst gift wrapper, but I am also the most conspicuous gift wrapper.

First of all, Dan knows exactly where all of his gifts are hidden, and it's only because of a strict code of honor that he does not go looking for them (and because he already knows what he is getting year after year since he closely monitors our credit card statements - another byproduct of his engineer brain).

"You'll never find them. They are hidden somewhere you would never go," I boasted this Christmas.

"You mean under the bed in the doll room?"

It didn't help that when I went to hide his presents this year, I slammed the garage door and ran past him in a blur, shouting behind me, "Stay where you are!"

Along the same lines, when I go to wrap his gifts, I hop over to wherever he is in the house and say in a sing-song voice, "Don't follow me . . . I'm doing something secret . . . I'm locking the door . . ."

"The doll room doesn't have a lock . . ."

"Shoot!" I say. "Well then, don't come in any closed doors . . ."

By contrast, Dan disappears (which doesn't alarm me at all because Dan disappears quite often - refer to my blog post entitled, "My Husband, the Ninja"), secretly emerges a few minutes later, and sets his elegantly wrapped gifts under the tree.

Once, I told Dan a story about one Christmas during my early college years when my mother forced me to volunteer at the Salvation Army. I was spending a lot of time sitting around the house, whining about my weight and my appearance, and my mother was tired of my self-absorbed ramblings.

"You are going to spend some time helping others who have real problems," my mother said.

She sent me to the Salvation Army. I was assigned to gift wrapping duty.

“They actually let you wrap gifts?” my husband asked incredulously.

"That’s not the point. My mother taught me a lot about the detriment of self-pity that year."

“Still," muttered Dan, "they let you wrap gifts . . . Did they see the finished product?”

Sometimes the Holidays Are Not So Joyful

One of my dearest friends lost her mother to pancreatic cancer yesterday, the day before Christmas Eve. In light of this terrible tragedy, I decided to postpone my typical witty repartee and dedicate my Christmas blog to my friend and my friend's family. It hardly seemed appropriate that I would write about my lack of gift-wrapping skills or the blue trail I conquered on my last cross-country skiing trip when my friend is suffering such terrible heartache right now.

My own mother died from cancer six years ago this January. The holidays are an excruciating time for anyone who has suffered loss, whether it happens in April, June, July, or December. But when we hear about a loss right before Christmas, it resonates deeper with us for some reason. Perhaps that is because Christmas is inherently a holiday about birth and renaissance. But death occurs when it occurs, oblivious to our cultural celebrations.

Our society handles death so strangely. At funerals, people will say you were "so strong" because you "didn't even shed a tear." That is called being completely numb and in denial - not unhealthy or abnormal, but it's still a manifestation of grief. Standard bereavement leave is about three days. We are told the grief process takes about a year, when that is just barely enough time for the shock to wear off. Then we are expected to be back to normal, when, in reality, nothing is ever "normal" in the same sense again.

When my mother died, I was so frustrated with the pat answers I would receive (especially from Christian friends). The other night when my friend called me after learning the devastating prognosis, I wanted so badly to encourage her that I am afraid I might have fallen back on some of the standard grieving jargon. For that, I apologize profusely.

The three most profound comforts when my mother died were snapshots that didn't require words at all. I remember my brother, Steve, and I sitting on either side of my mother waiting for the mortuary to take her away. I was seated on her right, Steve was on the left. We looked at each other and sighed wearily, almost in relief, in that brief moment clearly understanding what the other was feeling. I remember one of my best friends Tara hugging me at the funeral reception, her daughter in her arms, silent tears in her eyes, no words exchanged, just shared grief. And I remember my Aunt Rita and Aunt Jan helping in the kitchen and around the house, cooking, cleaning, taking care of the things my dad, brother, and I were too tired to think about.

I would get (and let's be honest, still get, because grief doesn't ever leave us completely) so angry - at God, at Dan my husband, at friends who didn't call enough and when they did call not actually wanting to talk to them, at the woman at church who was supposedly dying of cancer and everyone kept trying to get us to do this and that for her family and for her. But she hadn't died yet, and there I was dealing with death in its realest, most absolute form, not with some predicted death in the far off future.

And no matter how many friends or family members surrounded me during the days leading up to and following the funeral, I eventually found myself completely and utterly alone, in solitude and darkness, unwillingly encountering yet another wave of the human grieving experience.

Death never leaves us. There is always a void. Nothing is ever the same again. Especially during the holidays. Even when Dan and I fill our season with fun Christmas-oriented activities or we spend time with our new family, I still miss . . . something.

But eventually, there are moments of solace and consolation. My mother was an author and a journalist, and because of this, I still have record of my mother through her writings and her old diaries. Sometimes, I can hear her voice so vividly that she seems to be standing in the room with me. And in spite of my theological skepticism on the issue of ghosts and spirits, I could swear she was watching me during my performance of Anna in The King and I. Maybe these are God's ways of assuring us that He's still there even when we don't believe it. And, my dear friend, there may be times when you won't believe it.

Remember my friend, my sister, I love you.

A "Sew-Called" Feminist

When my mother died, I somehow inherited her sewing machine. I am not exactly sure why anyone would think that I would be interested in owning a sewing machine. I have been quite vocal throughout my lifetime about my disdain for stereotypical gender roles and, as a result, refused to learn how to sew - that is until I was an adult and, out of necessity, had to figure out how to sew on a button.

However, I never learned how to sew on a machine. My mother tried to teach me once or twice when I was a child, but I soon lost patience and spent my sewing lessons playing with my Barbies instead (because Barbie is not about stereotypical gender roles at all . . .).

For some reason, my brother didn't want the sewing machine, and my father's wife already had a machine - probably a newer model than my mother's 1960-something Signature from Montgomery Ward.

"We had it tuned up for you!" my father exclaimed proudly as he carried the machine into the living room, holding it from the bottom - like an over-sized box - since the plastic handle was broken. Apparently, sewing machines are like cars and require tune-ups every now and them.

"What do I do with it?" I asked.

My dad shrugged. He was just relieved to get it out of storage.

The sewing machine lived in our garage for a few years. Sometimes it would catch my eye when I was getting out of the car and I would say, "I should do something with that thing."

"No you shouldn't," the pseudo-feminist voice in my head would say. "Just because you are a woman doesn't mean you need to know how to use a sewing machine."

A few months ago, I was in a theater production where I had to sew curtains. I could either spend hours hand-stitching the curtains, or I could run them through a machine in about half the time.

So my husband and I dragged the sewing machine into our house, wary of inconspicuous spiders that may have made their homes in this odd contraption we were introducing into our abode.

We gathered around the thing, owner's manual from approximately 1968 in hand. Upon opening the manual, I was overwhelmed with words like "zig zag" and "monogramming" and "overlock," and I promptly handed it over to Dan.

I soon discovered that engineers make much better seamstresses than . . . well . . . me. Dan sat down and threaded the machine with a dexterity that I had not previously realized he possessed. And as you have probably guessed, Dan is a lot more patient than I am which is a necessary attribute for a skilled seamstress.

"Loosen the hand wheel," he said in soothing tones. "Now put the thread through the tension discs. And pull the thread through a hole in the bobbin - "

"What the heck is a bobbin? Is that really a word?"

Dan held up a little round metal object with multiple holes on the top and the bottom.

"This is a bobbin. You have to get the thread from that - " he pointed to something (that I now know is) called a spool "to this -" he pointed to the bobbin.

"How do you know all of this?"

"It's in the owner's manual," he said. (Finally, a man who reads the instructions.)

The first time I attempted to "wind the bobbin," the spool flew across the room.

"Is it supposed to do that when the bobbin is full?" I asked.

Dan frowned and picked up the empty spool.

"I don't think so. But that was pretty cool."

I also jammed the bobbin case in the machine when it didn't lock into place as quickly as I thought it should.

"You have to be gentle with it," said Dan a half-hour later, the amount of time it took him to undo the damage I had caused.

And with that, he petted it, murmured softly to it, and swiftly popped the case into the machine.

"You're the Sewing Machine Whisperer," I said, a little in awe of my husband's newly found talent.

Eventually, I was able to stitch straight enough to sew curtains. At first, while working on those infamous curtains, my thread kept snapping, and a nice woman at the theater fixed the tension on the machine (whatever that means). But I did finish the job and even accomplished it in less time than it would have taken me to hand-stitch.

Where is my sewing machine now, you may ask? Is it still in garage? No, it now sits in one of our guest rooms, right next to my miniature dollhouse. Has it been used since my curtain-sewing days? Well, no. After all, I wouldn't want to be forced into any sort of stereotypical gender role, especially not one that requires that much patience.