Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Just Call Me Martha Stewart: A Gift Wrapping Fail

Every Christmas, I look forward to seeing the gorgeous gift-wrapped packages that arrive in the mail from my mother-in-law.

If Pinterest were a person, it would be Phillip's mom. Her gifts are without fail, beautiful. They put the December cover photos of Martha Stewart Living to shame. They're so pretty you don't want to unwrap them.

They always look like this:

photo by blisfullyeverafter.net
Or this:
photo by homedepot.com

And replicating them would require a complicated tutorial that would surely end in disaster if someone like me were to attempt it:

photo by diy-enthusiasts.com

I know she spends a lot of time at this. Phillip says his mom used to stay up until early Christmas morning painstakingly wrapping each and every gift for her 7 children exactly like this. And now that those children are all grown and she has something like 1,500 grandkids, she still does it.

Every Christmas Eve, I think about her as Phillip and I stay up to wrap all of our gifts. Mostly because she would cry if she was privy to what goes on. (I'm sorry, Pattie. If you're reading this, stop now. You won't be able to unsee what I'm about to show next.)

In addition to being the kind of person who'll choose speed and efficiency over aesthetics 99 times out of 100, I'm also not that great at wrapping. Especially irregular-shaped packages. Luckily, our kids don't care if their presents look like this:

Appears to have been wrapped by a drunken 3-year-old.

Or if we don't use fancy gift labels and just write their names on with Magic Marker. (It's unfortunate that both of us also have subpar handwriting.)



This year we not only wrapped our own gifts to the kids, we wrapped a few from our extended family that were shipped directly to us. 

Forgetting whose package I was wrapping, I accidentally wrote the wrong name on this one. (To my credit, I did debate about re-wrapping it for a minute before moving on.)

Need to add the following disclaimer: "Wrapped by Mom and Dad. Your grandmother would never do this to you."

And now for a picture of the finished product. Voila! Another Evans family Christmas in the bag.

Maybe some store bought bows or something would make this picture a little less sad?

So in conclusion, don't fret if you feel like the most un-crafty person in the world. That would be me. After the kids decimate the packages and rip out the toys inside, it doesn't really matter anyway.

At least we still use pretty wrapping paper. (Although you shouldn't give me any ideas about using newspaper or cut-up grocery bags. I just might try it if you start throwing around words like "free.")

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7 comments:

Jenny Evans (sister, not author) said...

Read this with mom and she laughed and cried. She's very flattered.

Jenny Evans said...

I knew there would be crying. Pleased to hear there was laughing, too.

Anonymous said...

I can totally resonate with you on this. I hate wrapping. I used to pay my kids to wrap :)

Jenny Evans said...

I hadn't thought of that before... I think you've just opened a whole new world of possibilities to me.

PurpleSlob said...

Hey, who authorized you to take pix of how I wrap and write???

Jenny Evans said...

So there is another one of me out there, is there?

kaustin said...

My dad likes to wrap presents in walmart bags and duct tape. It is a pain in the butt to unwrap. His handwriting is also atrocious, would never fit on a tag and so he writes it on the package as well.