Brown paper packages tied up with strings are one of my favorite things. I don't remember when it started, but it was so long ago that the only brown paper I could find was in the section with the postal supplies and I usually bought it at Woolworths. I'm not sure why I started using it, but I imagine it's because it was a lot cheaper than the decorated stuff. In those days you couldn't find brown wrapping paper next to the Christmas rolls with reindeer and snowmen.
I've always loved wrapping presents. As soon as I figured out there was no Santa Claus, I started to help my mom wrap. I got so good at it that one time when I was home alone and sulking I unwrapped all of the presents under the tree and then rewrapped them. I kept it secret until I was sulking another time and yelled to the family, "And just so you all know, in 1979 I unwrapped all of the Christmas presents and rewrapped them. So there."
My gifts never have tape and there are never knots in the bows. When my niece and nephew saw someone struggling to open one they used to say, "It's a Tenley present. You just have to untie the bow and the whole package will open."
Several years ago when other brown gifts started showing up, I decided to adorn mine with polka dots and letters cut from scraps of Japanese paper lying around my studio. I'm not going to give up on the brown because, like everything else, it will go out of style again one day. Recently I've strayed a bit and sometimes use the brown paper placemats my friends don't soil when we go out for pizza or the rolls of off-white wallpaper I've found in my attic.
This holiday season was anything but brown paper packages tied up with strings. (Other than the 77 that I wrapped.) Almost all of the gifts I received were in bags. Little bags, big bags, cloth bags, paper bags and cellophane bags. What happened to good old candycane Christmas wrap and a pre-stapled bow on a small sticky square that never really sticks to the present? I can remember coming back from the mall with the rolls of wrapping paper and a bag of un-sticky bows. The tubes floated around in the shopping bag with all of their weight at one end and there was the constant order from Mom not to crush the bows in the bottom.
Fortunately a few of my favorite things in Italy come wrapped. The grocer wraps the parmigiano, the pastry chef wraps the tray of sweets and the gelato guy wraps the ice cream when you get it to-go. Here getting ice cream to-go doesn't mean walking away from the gelateria with a cone or cup. It means spending more than 20 euros on a little styrofoam tray filled with 16 scoops. I like to watch them wrap my little treats. They hold the paper tight in the middle, make creases at the corners of both ends and then fold them in to make the triangle flap just like I do (but they use tape).
Even if my birthdays and Christmases in Italy are filled with opening bags instead of unwrapping presents, I'm hopeful that as commonplace as well-aged parmigiano, mini-tiramisu and gelato have become in my life, they'll always seem like little gifts.
Every day is a gift if you live in the present. --Tenley Ysseldyke (maybe)
(Can I take credit for this quote? As I walked away from writing this piece I said it to myself out loud. I didn't think I'd heard it before so I googled it. I found, Every day is a gift. That's why they call it the present. But I didn't find mine and I like it.)
