How ‘Real Men’ Wrap Christmas Presents
600 words
I don’t like wrapping gifts, but I’m good at it. Damned good. I can go through a box of unwrapped presents like a busy production line, but there’d better be someone else there to write the names on the labels after I’ve wrapped them.
It’s another of those ‘precision manual skills’ where most men would probably excel. But we don’t want a load of chat about it. We don’t want last minute soul-searching whether a particular thing should go to Uncle Bill or Uncle Joe. Or nostalgia about previous bloody Christmas’s. All Uncles should get the same present anyway.
Nor do we take kindly to watching Her Ladyship faffing around with a roll of paper, a pair of scissors, a roll of Sellotape which keeps losing the end or rolling under the sofa, and, most irritating of all, a parcel balanced on her knee which keeps slipping off.
Real men organise things. They clear a space on a flat table big enough to work on. They have the tape on a proper dispenser, and if there’s not enough on the roll they discard the part roll and fit a full one to avoid slowing down.
They probably use a knife instead of scissors. This has the added advantage of keeping the woman’s fingers out of the damned way, because they get the same cold feelings in their stomach as we get when watching them slice cheese held in their hand, or sawing with a blunt knife at a loaf held in mid-air some distance above the table/work surface.
Men like a pile of unwrapped presents on a chair or similar at one end of the table and a box at the other to shove them in immediately after wrapping, thus keeping the table clear for wrapping duties. Women who insist on taking a corner of the table for writing names on the packages are best deterred with a few theatrically wild-seeming slashes of the knife.
There is no reason why a woman cannot scribble a name on a parcel whilst it’s on her lap… After all, she was originally prepared to wrap the bugger there whilst juggling all the tools and tape until you finally gave in with disgust and took over to ‘do it properly’.
I suggest that you have at least two brand new - but tested - pens in your pocket to replace the ones she will bring to the task. Hers will inevitably be dying, or ‘blobby’, or lose themselves in rapid order.
Do not accept the poor weaselly excuse that ‘as you’re doing so well maybe I should leave you to it and get the dinner on’. If you’re wrapping she can damned well sit there and admire your skill. If she’s feeling bored, then ‘tough titty’. It’s the very least she can do for you. If you let her get away she’ll never remember which parcels are which and then you’ll have to carefully re-open them so she can label them.
So, in my carefully considered opinion, based on years of experience, parcel wrapping should be a joint venture. One with the man doing the skilled work and the woman writing in the names whilst gazing adoringly at her hero as the blade flashes, the terrified Sellotape behaves with perfect limp docility - instead of sticking everywhere but where it should - and all the presents for all those damned ungrateful buggers who will just rip the wrapping off any old how are wrapped in about thirty minutes flat.
BTW, parcels for birthdays or other lesser events and needs are women’s work. Never let them think you’ll do their work all the time.
“That, Gentlemen, is what Christmas parcel wrapping is about.”
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