There’s a quote from The Office that’s always stuck with me for all the wrong reasons. One character says, “If you’re using more than three pieces of tape to wrap a present, you’re doing it wrong.”
Clearly, no one in that writers’ room ever met my grandma Ida Lou Polcari. She taught me that, in order to wrap a beautiful present, tape is your very best friend. My grandma wrapped gifts so securely that it often took a bit of force to get through the paper to the goods inside. But you could never say that her presents weren’t pretty.
Grandma’s Elves
When my brother and I were younger, my grandma would recruit us to join her own version of Santa’s workshop. She drove from Maryland to Chattanooga to spend a couple weeks with us each December, so our guest room overflowed with presents, wrapping paper, bows, boxes, bags, tissue paper, ribbons, gift tags, multiple pairs of scissors, and an arsenal of Scotch tape. It made the room feel like our secret home base throughout the holiday season. Some might feel like picking out and wrapping a present is a tedious task, but my grandma turned it into an art.
Shopping
Our first duties as Grandma’s Elves involved going to the mall to do some Christmas shopping for our parents. My grandma gave my brother and I each a budget to work within, often nudging us to pool our resources and work together to find the perfect gift for each parent. Not only did she show us the Christmas magic that only a department store decked out in glittery life-size Santas can bring, but she snuck in some math lessons too.
Grandma loved a sale, so she taught us how to stretch our budgets. She’d ask us to calculate the total price of the items in our hands, accounting for both subtracting a discount and then adding on sales tax. We couldn’t go to the register before we had figured out the total cost—no calculators allowed. (Can you tell she worked in education?) But now I can tally the tip I owe on a bill without even blinking, and I have Grandma’s Christmas boot camp to thank for that.
The Essentials
Once we’d secured our wares—and rewarded ourselves to lunch in the food court—we’d reconvene in the guest room. My grandma preferred to avoid using bags whenever possible, since they limited the amount of personalization she could add. Instead, she had boxes in nearly every size, so bulky, awkwardly shaped items rarely derailed her process. She splurged on the paper with grid lines on the underside, making cutting in a straight line and estimating the amount of paper needed a breeze, and she always had at least one extra pair of scissors or roll of tape on hand for whenever we inevitably lost some supplies along the way.
Wrapping 101
My grandma abhorred waste, so even if my measurements were off and I came up a little short, she usually had leftover gift wrap in the same pattern squirreled away. She’d help me arrange the paper, putting all the patchwork on the bottom of the present, so that the recipient would never know the difference—and so that one little mistake wouldn’t mar the pretty scene under the tree. And here’s once again why I say you need much more than three pieces of tape. It is your lifesaver in this exact scenario! How else do you expect scraps to blend in seamlessly?…