Feb. 10: Wrappity wrap wrap

I’m not one of those who goes out of their way to disguise gifts I give. If I’m giving you a DVD or a Wii game, it’s gonna look like a DVD or a Wii game. It will be wrapped attractively, yes, but not deceitfully. However, as I began to wrap Katie’s birthday gift yesterday, I realized I had to do something to make it look less like what it actually was. See, we gave her an iPod touch, and I knew that if it looked like an iPod touch, Jack would say so loudly before I had a chance to tell him to shut the hell up and just let his sister open her birthday gift.

I walked around checking closets for a box I could wrap the iPod in, and found one that our wine glasses came in. Once the cardboard divider was removed, it was the perfect size—not huge, but enough to throw off Katie’s and Jack’s pre-unwrapping guesses.

It was a nice box, very sturdy, with a lid. The bottom was pink and the top was printed with the wine glass info, so I thought, “Hmm… I’ll just wrap the lid in a paper that coordinates with the pink. BECAUSE EVERYTHING HAS TO LOOK OH-SO-PRETTY AND MATCH ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS.

Have you ever tried to wrap just the lid of a box? What was I thinking? The outside can pretty much be wrapped like a normal gift, but then the inside looks all stupid with only a little bit of wrap here and there. Does it matter that no one really looks on the inside of the lid? No. I still had to cover every bit of that damn thing, inside and out, and I swear I used almost a whole roll of wrap and I was cursing at kids these days and Steve Jobs and I’ll admit it: I kinda didn’t even like Katie very much by the time I was done.

‘Course, when she saw what was inside, the expression on her face was worth all the cursing and wrapping paper waste-age. And when she was presented with her very own iTunes account, I was proud as could be with her first purchases: Pictureka and Talking Carl. That’s my girl.