Tacky Gifts

The girls and I were wrapping gifts tonight at the dining room table. The paper was purchased at 90% off during a way, way after Christmas sale at the Hallmark store. It never occurred to me to read the labels because gift wrap is gift wrap. It's all paper.

Upon closer examination this weekend, it turns out that some of our super sale paper has a most unfortunate feature. It is self-adhesive. And the stuff tears... repeatedly while one is trying to unroll it. I like to position, and reposition the packages to maximize paper use, but that is not possible with gummy goo on the back of the paper. It sticks to skin. And hair. There might have been some teensy shrieks of minor fury from the dining room. I'm not really sure what was happening outside the growing red haze of a narrowed focus on the persistently uncooperative paper, but I do recall the mister coming into the room and promising to replace all the paper with new at any price if I would just put down the self-adhesive stuff.

Eventually the screaming stopped. The girls opted out on the self-adhesive paper, but I can say that it looks rather nice once it is carefully smoothed over the planes and angles of a box. The great irony of the stuff is that once one folds down the ends there is still a need for tape to close the ends because the folds cover the adhesive. The stuff sticks to itself very well. Fortunately, the paper can be peeled oh-so-slowly back in a Herculean exercise of patience to be replaced in a new position without any real reduction in tackiness.

There are two rolls of the self-adhesive stuff still unopened, and there is the option to include gift wrap with our Angel Tree goodies. It is time to take the mister up on his offer of new paper because it would be wrong to wish the frustration of sticky paper on our Angel Tree recipient's parents. It's one thing to demand such rigid "Waste Not!" measures of oneself, but quite another to impose them on someone else.