There are people, I believe, who have turned wrapping a present into an art form. Martha Stewart has devoted hours of telly and pages of print to beautiful gift wrapping. The December issue of my beloved O Magazine features a page devoted to unique ways of wrapping gifts, including adding ferns and foliage, or using two layers of different paper and punching holes in one of them so the bottom layer shows through. Tori Spelling's ma famously had an ENTIRE ROOM devoted to wrapping up presents.
My gift-wrapping room, if I had one, would contain an ancient roll of sellotape and some weirdly shaped fragments of wrapping paper bought in a newsagents at the last minute. I am not good at wrapping presents. Despite the fact that I like making things and am vaguely creative, when it comes to the simple act of putting some paper around something and sticking it together, I am a disaster.
Martha, the Wrapping MuseThis may, just may, be partly because I leave my gift wrapping until the last minute and am generally to be found frantically trying to wrap presents for my entire family at half eleven on Christmas eve, gradually realising that I won't have enough paper to cover everything. Under these circumstances, it's not surprising that the resulting packages look like they were wrapped by a drunk child (I have never seen a drunk child, of course, let alone one let loose on M&S wrapping paper, but I imagine if I did the results would be a lot like the presents my family received from me last year). If I tried to add some foliage or punch holes in anything, my gifts would look even more like some amateurish art experiment. I've been known to resort to nice gift bags even though they're more expensive, just because they don't involve cutting and sellotaping.
It's not so bad if I'm wrapping something conventiently rectangular, like a book, or something flat, like a scarf or a t-shirt. But generally a book is accompanied by another small gift, creating a sort of weirdly shaped structure that defies all my attempts to cover it neatly. As for kids' toys, which these days seem to come in weirdly shaped containers with half the toy sticking out - well, it's a good thing my nephews are all too young to know how wonky their gifts appear.
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This year, however, I'm determined to make a difference. I've bought nice patterned Japanese washi tape, I've already had a trial run, as my sister and her husband are staying in London for Christmas with their brand new baby, and I had to wrap their gifts well in advance so my mum could take them over when she went to visit them this week. And maybe it was because I was just trying to wrap a couple of things and it wasn't late at night after an evening spent stuffing myself with Roses and red wine, but the gifts looked relatively civilised. If I say so myself.
So with a few days left until Christmas, I'm going to try and get started early so I'm not giving everything messy bundles of paper with bits of sellotape everywhere. But in the end, I have to remind myself that it doesn't really matter what a present looks like. Unless you're Martha Stewart or Tori Spelling's mum, of course.
So what about you? Are you a wrapping expert? Do you leave it until the last minute? And does a nicely wrapped present really make a difference?
