LUV & HAT

LUV - Wrapping Christmas presents is brilliant. It’s brilliant. It’s one of my favourite things about Christmas, up there with decorating the tree and smothering every available foodstuff in cranberry jelly and brandy butter for a week.

Oh, I know you don’t care. I know that, as long as the parcel you butcher open with your clammy meathooks on Christmas morning contains Assassin’s Creed and not Schott’s Miscellany again, it wouldn’t bother you if it was wrapped in tampon wrappers. But that’s fine. Because Christmas wrapping isn’t about you. It’s about aesthetics. No, not Jesus. AESTHETICS.

You see, if everyone thought like you, Paperchase would be stacked with brown paper and cards with the word “WHATEVER” printed on them in beige. But it’s not. Paperchase at Christmas is a joyful cavalcade of turquoise and gold, magenta and emerald, silver twig things, tinsel stag things and hundreds of women (and men who work in graphic design) milling around in a colour and texture-based trance, trying to find rosettes in the precise opposite Pantone colour from the wrapping paper that they’ve chosen. DON’T ASK WHY IT’S IMPORTANT IT JUST IS.

And I haven’t even got to the PENS. My GOD the pens. Gold pens and silver pens and pens that make it look like it’s been snowing and FAT GLITTER GLUE PENS. Christmas is the only time anyone over school age has licence to be so tackily profligate about stationery. PENS! It’s marvellous. Gawd bless us every one.

Then, once you’ve bought your Christmas wrapping, you get to take it all home and sit under the fairy lights with a glass of wine, blubbing shamelessly at Miracle on 34th Street while curling ribbons and writing gift cards in decreasingly legible script (Mum, that says “lovely”, not “labia”, honest) until you have a perfect pile of jewel-like gifts glinting like undiscovered gems beneath the tree.

And it doesn’t matter that your efforts will be annihilated come Christmas Day. The Christmas wrapping ritual is a wonderfully soothing break from the bustle, stress, hangovers and sheer consumerism of December; a chance to commune with your inner virtuoso so you can create something beautiful, if temporary.

At least, that’s the plan. Odds are that I’ll triple book myself throughout December until the only chance I get to wrap presents will be during a loo break, half-cut on Christmas Eve, yelling “DON’T COME IN” with my foot braced against the door, slowly strangling myself with Sellotape and loo paper.

Which probably means you are going to get a present wrapped, at least partially, in tampon wrappers. So in a way we all win. In a way.
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year. It is. I bloody love Christmas. But Christmas isn’t perfect. There are two things in particular that nark me off something mental about it. One is Christmas cards (because, look, I’ve already said “Merry Christmas” to your face, so I shouldn’t have to essentially give you a twatting receipt as well, you greedy turd), and the other is Christmas wrapping.

And advent calendars. OK, three things. And ice rinks. Four things. And red Starbucks cups. Look, shut up.

Anyway, Christmas wrapping is so utterly bloody redundant that it makes my piss curdle. This is especially true if you’re buying presents for my family. On two separate occasions in the last few weeks, I’ve been shopping with them. First my mum marched me to a shop and pointed at what she wanted for Christmas. And then my brother did exactly the same thing a few days later. They both know precisely what they’re getting. So I’ve told them exactly what I want, too.

This means that, on Christmas morning, there’ll be no excitement or suspense whatsoever. My brother will already know that he’s got a boxset of Lost and my mum will know that she’s getting An Idiot Abroad. And - oh, fuck it - you didn’t ask for it but, Dad, you’re getting a Blu-Ray player. There, now I don’t have to wrap that up, either. I can just dump everything under the tree and leave you to it, you VULTURES.

And I’m not saying this because I’m shit at wrapping things up, either. OK, fine, I am saying that because I’m a bit shit at wrapping things up. In fact, I’m hopeless at it. The upside of this is that it can lend an air of genuine excitement to Christmas morning, because my wrapping abilities are so remedial that nobody can really tell whether I’ve got them a CD or a mountain bike. But the downside is that I will definitely spend at least one December evening on my hands and knees, trying to hold a raggedy sheet of paper in place with my foot while I repeatedly fail to pull off an acceptable length of Sellotape with my teeth. And crying, obviously. Obviously I’ll be crying at the same time.

So fuck you, Christmas wrapping. Fuck buying wrapping paper. Fuck wrapping with wrapping paper. And especially fuck the gnawing sense of environmental guilt that you get as you throw away two entire binbags of the stuff at about three minutes past nine on Christmas morning having barely looked at it anyway.

Still, it could be worse. I used to go out with a girl whose family wrapped up Easter eggs. I mean what the hell?
- Stuart Heritage