Bows and Arrows

As part of preparing for my role in A Christmas Carol, I did some research on life in early Victorian England. As you might expect, living conditions among the poor were appalling, especially when it concerned child labor. Children were often forced into factory work as young as three years old. They would scuttle about beneath the madly-whirring looms to pick up stray bobbins and push mine carts in dangerous and cramped tunnels. Reading about them, I felt obvious compassion. But I also felt kinship since I, too, lost part of my childhood because of lax child labor laws.

Many who know me also know that I love to organize things. The office supply cabinet is a mess? I’m on it. The prop room at the theatre is a potential super-fund site? I’ll take care of it. But that tendency goes back much further. To my mother’s dismay, I was always re-organizing her spice drawer. Sometimes alphabetically, sometimes, by color, sometimes by – well it doesn’t matter – she never knew where to find anything she needed. The books in my room were arranged by size or shape, never by author; they looked neater that way. This is not to imply that I have OCD. No, I am perfectly comfortable sitting amidst chaos and I can sleep peacefully knowing that the sink is full of dishes. It’s just that, sometimes, a guy’s just gotta organize.

Back to my lost childhood. Early on, I developed a knack for gift-wrapping, which is just another form of organizing. Something about it – the pretty paper, the bows, the geometry of finding an efficient way to cover oddly-shaped items – made it a satisfying challenge. But where I saw amusement, my parents saw opportunity. It started innocently enough, with me helping out in a pinch on Christmas Eve, but it came to a head one year while spending the holiday at our Tahoe cabin. I was only 10, but I was put to work wrapping all of the presents for the entire family.

While my brother and sister threw snowballs outside, my father watched TV in the living room and my mother made Old Fashioned cocktails in the kitchen (see Bourbon and Bitters, September 2010), I sat upstairs on the floor of the unheated master bedroom and wrapped an endless stream of presents. The shiny paper sliced open my delicate forearms. Scotch tape congealed painfully under my fingernails. The curling ribbon twined its tentacles around my wrists and threatened to drag me under the bed, to be eaten alive by dust-bunnies.

But I kept at it, working in a fugue state, surviving on tortillas and jam slid under the closed door by my sympathetic grandmother. Each morning, I could hear my family leave to go skiing; then return in the late afternoon full of laughter. Days and weeks passed. I suppose I could have tried to escape, but I was sure my gaolers would be waiting outside the door in anticipation of just such a mutiny. What had begun as a beguiling hobby had turned into a cruel death march.

I slowly made my way through the bags of unwrapped gifts bearing the names of my mother and father, my brother and sister, my grandma, and even the family dog. I finished wrapping the last chew toy and then reached for the next bag – the one with my name on it. That was when I finally snapped. I had reached a tipping point – I would not wrap my own Christmas presents.

Slipping out of the room quietly, I tiptoed down the hallway, trying to distribute my weight on the outside edges of the floorboards to keep them from creaking. Then I peeked around the corner into the living room. They were all there. Thus trapped, I decided to brazen it out and nonchalantly continued down the staircase. “Where have you been?” asked my sister. I mumbled a reply. “Would you like some eggnog?” asked my mother. “You’ve been up there for over an hour. You must be starved.”

An hour! My time-sense had been altered by hallucinogenic fumes from the Sharpie pens I had used to write out gift tags. I rejoined my family reluctantly, unsure of how to behave in this Brave New Post-Gift-Wrapping World. It would take time to rehabilitate. The eggnog was a start.

That was the last Christmas that I wrapped gifts for the entire family. Like a teenager who has gotten a summer job at an ice cream parlor, I had had my fill of spumoni. The thrill of the bow was gone.

These days, I am getting in the habit of wrapping gifts as soon as I bring them home, to avoid the Christmas Eve rush. But on those rare occasions when I have something wrapped in the department store, it feels like being shot through with an arrow. I watch them work ever so efficiently with their waist-high tables, their wrapping paper and ribbon fed from long metal spools, their razor-sharp shears, and think about what might have been.

Had I not been burned out so early on the Wrapping Game, I might have made it to the pros. I had the talent, I had the initiative. Damn it, I had the moves. It was just a case of too much, too soon. And for that I place the blame firmly where it belongs – my parents.