All Gift Wrapped

All Gift Wrapped
I spent yesterday sorting and wrapping Christmas gifts for my family. We plan to celebrate tommorrow on Christmas Day. As a youth, my Mom Sybil Miner Beck would assign me the task of wrapping Christmas gifts at my childhood home. I ued to make very beautiful bows and because of that, it became my annual job. At first I didn’t mind, but it slowly became a job that I detested.
The reasons I hated to wrap gifts were twofold. The first was that most of the time of the time I had to use the lick and stick seals with te dry glue on the backside to fasten the edges of the wrapping paper in place to seal the paper wrapping. My Mom occasionally would have some shiny cellophane “Scotch” tape for me to use, but the tape would always be in short supply and I could only use small slivers of tape to secure the wrapping paper around the present. It was a horribly tedious task. Mom didn’t have a problem buying gifts, but she didn’t like to buy a large supply of tape, or do the gift wrapping or herself and my Dad Carl Beck couldn’t be bothered doing the wrapping. He would much rather wind some ribbon or string around the bag and stick a name tag on it.
Mom would even welsh out on wrapping my Christmas gifts. She would hide the gift inside bags, then turn them over to me to wrap. I must say as a kid, although I was tempted, I didn’t snoop. That happened mych later in my life. I didn’t want to know what presents that my Mom had purchased.
My Dad rarely shopped except gifts for my Mom. Because of the hours he worked, he would often wait until the last minute and would rush into Burn’s Drug in Connellsville, Pennsylvania on Christmas Eve to make some hasty purchases. All are just memories now. All are treasures lodged in my mind. One thing I always do is to keep plenty of cellophane tape on hand at Christmas.
Merry Christmas to all.