Wrapping with shipping tape is what scares me the most about Christmas.

I always conveniently forget this fact 11 out of 12 months of the year, until we get to December again. Then I spend days wrapping and mailing holiday gift packages, and I remember I hate shipping tape. You know the kind I mean: the heavy duty clear shipping packaging tape that comes on a roller you can never make work.

Here’s why I hate that tape: I am emotionally and physically unable to mail a package unless I’ve got it so well secured with shipping tape that it takes a chain saw to open it. This is an inherited trait. My father used to wrap packages like this too – you couldn’t find a single exposed edge anywhere on a package he sent.

“Mom,” my kids would say when we got a package from Grandpa. “How do we open it? Where does the tape start? Where does it end? Is this a trick?”

“Of course not,” I told them. “It’s the work of a master. Grandpa is the best packager in the world. I’ll get the chain saw.”

Mission: secure package with shipping tape

So naturally, I wrap packages the same way — with layers of shipping tape. The problem is that while heavy duty shipping packaging tape is the only way I can be sure a package is securely wrapped, it is also the most frustrating way to achieve the desired result. Let me demonstrate:

I take the nicely wrapped gift and then wrap it again, but this time in brown paper. Holding the edges together with one hand, with my other hand, I attach the end of the shipping tape to the point at which the edges overlap. Then I draw out the tape sharply and smartly down the seam where the two edges of the brown paper meet. (I admit it, I love the ripping sound the tape makes as it lifts off the roll. Cheap thrill, I know.)

With a quick flip of my wrist, I then snap the tape dispenser down to cut the tape.

But it doesn’t cut.

Then I twist the tape dispenser so the tape dispenser’s nice little teeth will cut the tape.

It doesn’t cut.

I twist in the opposite direction.

Again, it doesn’t cut. The tape dispenser is now hanging onto the package, held securely in place by its roll of heavy duty tape.

With my other hand, I grasp the edge of the tape and try to cut it by pulling it over the teeth of the dispenser. It still doesn’t cut.

Mission: impossible?

By this time, I realize the tape will never be cut by the teeth because it’s twisted over on itself and is now a sticky tangle of tape. I give up on the dispenser, go find the scissors, and cut the tape. Then I have to pull the tape back off the package because the sticky tangle won’t hold the seam. I redo the seam, this time smoothing the tape carefully over the paper and cutting the end with scissors. I liberally apply shipping tape over all the edges, the ends, and once around the package. I discard about three feet of tape because despite my best efforts, they still twist over on themselves into a sticky tangle while I’m trying to attach them to the package.

I tell myself I will never mail another package in my life. I run out of shipping tape with two seams to go.

At this point, I’m determined to mail this package no matter what. So I decide to go for the big guns. I go out to the garage and get the duct tape.

A work of art…and tape

When I am done, the package looks like a home construction project gone bad: bits of shipping tape stick up at the ends and the duct tape is patched over it; if I glued on a little strip of drywall it wouldn’t look out of place.

That’s when I take it to the post office to mail.

“First class?” the clerk asks me, obviously with a great deal of hesitation.

“You bet,” I answer. After all, this is a masterpiece of packaging I’m mailing.

Ah, Christmas. ‘Tis the season to be jolly… and warm up those chainsaws, folks.

 

 

 

 

The post Wrapping up Christmas appeared first on Jan Dunlap.