What I'm Reading

Stardust by Joseph Kanon
Coming out in the fall, the next novel by the author of The Good German. It's so good I kinda want to lick the pages.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Monkey Wrap



Rhea Bouchard Powers is a columnist for one of the local Woonsocket papers, and when I lived there I always loved reading her columns. They're very real, very "a day in the life," and often very funny. My mom reads it, and a few years ago there was my all-time favorite column. It was about that great bane of my existence--Christmas wrapping. Ugh.

Ms. Powers's theory is that people all fall into different categories of wrappers. There are the Martha Stewart wrappers, where every package is a work of art. The precision wrappers, whose edges are folded with military precision. The average Joe wrappers, whose packages are unexceptional. And then way down at the bottom, the monkey wrappers, so named because their packages look like they were wrapped by a monkey.

Now when this column ran, I had long since moved to New York, but my mom cut it out of the paper, saved it, and stuck it on the fridge with a cow magnet. Every time one of my sisters came over, she'd make her read the article. And the day I got home for Christmas break, she handed it to me and said, "This is for you. You're a monkey wrapper." Now, another girl might have been insulted by that. But I know the truth. And the truth is that she's absolutely right. My wrapping is atrocious. I have actually given packages where I ran out of wrapping and the piece I had didn't quite wrap all the way around the present, so I cut off a strip from the end and just taped it in between. Somehow, even when I actually try to make my wrapping decent, it still always ends up baggy. And I have gotten out of wrapping countless birthday presents by telling my nephews "You can have it now, in the bag it came in, or I can wrap it. But then you're going to have to wait for it." (For the record, that one works every time. Foolproof.)

So monkey wrap became a standard expression in the Bookgirl family lexicon. And over the years, we've expanded it to fit other activites that require patience and/or manual dexterity. My sister Denise, for example, in addition to being a monkey wrapper, monkey folds laundry and is a monkey texter. (I know the buttons on the phone are little, and it's easy to make mistakes, but I have to regularly respond to her messages with, "I don't know what that means" or simply "monkey text," in which case she knows to try again.

With Christmas coming, I was really wishing I had the original article to share with everyone, so I sent a letter (typed even) to the the author, asking her if she might consider rerunning the article, or at least emailing it to me so I could pass it around. Not only did she rerun it AND email it to me, I even got a shout out in her column. Made me happy, I tell you.

Note: Today’s column, previously seen in 2001, is appearing again by popular demand. Well, actually, one woman named Bookgirl, formerly of Woonsocket but currently living in Jackson Heights, N.Y., wrote and asked if I could rerun it, and since I’m up to my eyeball in Adopt-a-Family stuff and have no time to write from scratch, it seemed like a good idea.



Monkey Wrapping
By
Rhea Bouchard Powers


I have long maintained that the gift-giving world is made up of those who hard-wrap and those who soft-wrap. Those who feel that every item of clothing should be placed in a tissue paper-lined box prior to being wrapped, and those who feel that boxing is superfluous and that paper alone should suffice.
I had never really given it any thought until several years ago when I volunteered to help wrap gifts at Adopt-a-Family.
There was a winter coat waiting to be wrapped, so I unrolled a length of paper and placed the neatly folded coat on it.
“Aren’t you going to put it in a box? Bobbie asked.
“No,” I replied. “I think boxes are a waste of money.”
“But they look so much neater,” she persisted.
“Soft-wrapping takes less time and less paper. Besides, soft-wrapped packages pack a lot more easily,” I countered. The good-natured debate has gone on throughout the ensuing years with neither of us changing our mind.
I also believe that the world can be further subdivided into various styles of wrappers.
For instance, there are those to whom wrapping is an art form. The Martha Stewarts of the world who see each box as a blank canvas just waiting to be turned into a masterpiece and whose gift wrapping almost qualifies as a gift on its own. You know the ones I mean. They’re the ones that have people “oohing” and “aahing” before they even see what’s inside the package.
Then you have the precision wrappers. They’re the ones whose packages never have a raw edge showing. Their seams are double folded. Their ends are neatly trimmed. All their folds are sharply creased and their corners as neatly mitered as well-made hospital beds. These are the people who, if they were in the army, would have quarters bounced on their beds.
Next in the hierarchy are your average Joes, gift-wrappers whose packages are unexceptional. They’re neat but not militarily so. Their work attracts little or no attention. It’s just gift-wrap.
Last but not least, at the bottom of the feeding chain, so to speak, you have the category my family refers to as monkey wrappers (the group into which my sister Bev and I fall), so called because the finished product invariably looks like it was wrapped by a monkey. The more gifts there are to be wrapped, the more monkeyesque it gets. Get Bev and me wrapping together and the quality slips even further.
When we wrap in tandem, Bev usually does the cutting because she’s the only one who can get the scissorless paper cutter to work. She cuts, I tape. The only time we’re particular about trimming the paper to fit the gift is when paper is running short or we need the trimmings to wrap smaller gifts. Otherwise we just fold it all up and tape it in place. Paper a tad too short? Not a problem. We’ll bridge the gap with tape. Running a little low on tape? That’s okay. We’ll put the peel-and-stick gift tags to double use holding the main seam together. Crude, perhaps, but it works.
When it comes to bulky or oddly shaped items we employ the “bunch and tape” method whereby you wrap the paper around the widest part and anchor it with a piece of tape. Then you bunch the paper up and tape it all together as best you can. Again, it may not be pretty but it gets the job done.
We have been doing this for years I have to tell you truthfully, we’ve never had a single complaint. Kids, especially, don’t care how their gifts are wrapped. All they want to know is what’s inside the paper.
It works for me.


So in what can only be described as true irony, a project came up last week. We (and in this case we, said by anyone, means me) should send our key bookstore buyers copies of our big new release as holiday presents. Oh, and they should be wrapped. And again, since marketing translates loosely into "anything that doesn't fall clearly into someone's else job description" that left me with a giant roll of gift wrap, a handy paper dispenser, and 100 books. Now, I've never minded being bad at wrapping. It's not an aspirational talent for me. Anyone lucky enough to be getting a gift from me loves me for many reasons that have nothing to do with my ability to fold and tape. So I've always happily monkey wrapped, cringing just a little at the final product.

But these were going to VIPs. With my publisher's name on them. Shaming myself is one thing. Shaming her was something else entirely. So I wrapped a few, and then went for a second opinion. I called one of my colleagues to come take a look. Were they really that bad??

The look on his face was priceless. I'm not sure if he was more appalled as a gay man or as my Advertising and Promotions Director, someone whose whole job it is to make things look good, but all he could say to me was, "What are you? Six? Those look like they were wrapped by a child." At which point he made me sit down with him, gave me a step by step tutorial, and then made me do a couple while he watched, critiquing my every move. Now again, another girl might have been insulted. But I was just too grateful that my packages were less pathetic to take too much umbrage. Just in case he started thinking that insulting me was okay though, I waited until he left for the night and covered his office with rolled up gift wrap scraps. Yeah, that showed him.

5 comments:

Diosa said...

Priceless, Bookgirl. Absolutely, priceless. I think I fall under Average Joe, myself. I'm sure my mother is horrified.

J said...

You never cease to make me pee myself ;)

I too am a monkey wrapper. Even worse, I might be a monkey wrapper with two left hands. Its truly awful.

I just wrapped presents to mail to my best friend. She will be duly horrified, no doubt. I normally use gift bags (a monkey wrapper's best idea) but this year decided to show her my true talents...god save her soul.

Fortunately, my trio is too busy ripping to care how they're wrapped.

Anonymous said...

I'm a precision wrapper.

Kudos to you for giving a busy woman (Rhea) an excuse to relax a little at the holiday.

Anonymous said...

Very nice. I'm surprised that your a monkey wrapper though, I would have guessed the opposite....

Bookgirl said...

Di, Your average joe looks like art next to my monkey wrap.

J, Three cheers for monkey wrappers!

Polly, Of course you are.

Liz, I'd wrap a present for you so you could see just how bad my wrapping is, but that would involve actually wrapping something extra.