My mother is an expert gift-wrapper. She has a long history of folding and taping the corners of a box so tight you can barely find a corner unfortified enough to slit open with a pair of scissors to unwrap it.
For many of my childhood years, my mother also made her own bows.
She did what, you ask?!
Yes. SHE MADE HER OWN BOWS. She had some kind of a plastic fork-like device that she used to impale the end of the ribbon, then fold lengths of ribbon over and over in perfect measure until she tied it tightly in the middle and pulled each fold open until her bow looked like a shiny, satin chrysanthemum.
I don’t know how old I was when I walked into a Hallmark store and saw rows of pre-made bows on display with the wrapping paper, but it shocked me. I had no idea that decorating a present was as easy as peeling off the waxy paper on the bottom of a machine-made bow and sticking it on top of a gift. What a miracle! Eventually, even my mother succumbed to the time-saving convenience afforded by modern manufacturing and started buying pre-made bows. But that’s okay. When I consider that my mother had five rambunctious kids that wore her out and probably drove her crazy, I can’t believe she didn’t forgo pretty paper, ribbons and bows and just wrap our gifts with the Sunday comic section and write our names on top with a fat, black Sharpie pen.
Uh… confession time… I’ve actually done that for my own two boys.
And that’s the thing. I did not inherit my mother’s genetic predisposition to make presents pretty. When I wrap a gift, I never measure the paper right or cut it properly and usually end up crunching and crushing wads of extra paper on the ends, using extra Scotch tape to stuff it all into place.
The 3M Company must love me.
But I’m about to go wrap Christmas presents and I’m thinking of Mum, remembering how beautifully she wrapped all of our gifts. Right now, I’m really appreciating the time and care she took to make every present for me and my siblings something special.
Thanks Mum. I wish I had told you that sooner.
But I’m still going to need extra tape.
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Ann K. Howley is the award-winning author of Confessions of a Do-Gooder Gone Bad.
Please visit her website at http://annkhowley.com/#about-ann
photo credit: <a href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/w00ter/15809376400/”>Wouter de Bruijn</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>cc</a>