Holiday Time (my Pre Season rant)

I love a holiday.  To date the only person I know that loves any holiday be it Veteran's Day or Easter the way I do is my friend, Molly.  

I have begun my Christmas shopping with the intent of being completely finished by December 14th.  Why, that day? I have no idea, just a good goal for me. 

I spent my weekend picking up a few gifts, but more importantly I picked up a few wrapping essentials.

I love to wrap gifts, no stick on bows for this girl.  Oh no, I spent seven Christmas seasons in retail, in the trenches, behind a wrapping station.  I can wrap gifts effectively and efficiently.  I shouldn't but I pride myself in my ability to tie a bow that makes people say wow.  I attribute this to my mom firstly and then to my years at Chaney's Pharmacy.

With that said, on Saturday night I sprinted through Wal-Mart to pick up some wrapping supplies, for the gifts I had bought earlier in the day.  I'm funny about my paper, I would rather have a solid in a good color or a pretty simple print over some gosh awful gaudy mess.  

Saturday I ran into a friend on the aisle and we both pondered over which was the best value and what would look the best with our colors....I don't have colors, but I do have a little boy who might be amused by some papers more  so than others.  

I grabbed the solid silver glitter paper and some stick on tags and headed to the next aisle.  

Just this morning while muffins were baking, and Jett and Cullen napped I decided to wrap a few gifts. I open the glitter paper and think to myself - uh oh.  It was really glitter paper not paper that resembeled the look of glitter.  With the plastic wrap off, my black dining room table was sprinkled with glitter.  I put the Scott tape dispenser aside and grabbed the packing tape, I knew I would need better grip.

I taped the back in record time, flipped to the ends had one done and was working on the other when I had to stop to reapply the tape to the first end... I sighed and kept on working.  

Next was the bow.  I slit open the roll of ribbon only to find that the packagers had run a piece of tape down the outside of all the ribbon this year unlike the over under technique they had used in the past.

As I tried to free the one ribbon color I wanted, they all unraveled into a shiny, curly, mess.

I decided not to divide and conquer, instead I went with the color on the end and by the time I had a length of ribbon that was appropriate, each end of my wrapped box was no longer wrapped and the back had also come undone.  For an efficient wrapper this was it, I ripped the paper from the box and took it and the roll of beautiful glitter to the garbage.  

I dug my trusty red with white dot from the closet and moved about finishing the wrapping.  Of course the color of ribbon initially picked didn't work, so I went back to the now tangled mess of ribbon to try and cut myself a workable piece.

Now, with bow on the package and paper that stayed taped I was ready for the label.

I opened the labels and started from the corner to pull the sticker from the backing...nope it wasn't budging.  I moved to the next corner, the next label, and finally after I moved from the outside edge of labels to the center and still had not freed one label I decided to remove the entire sheet of labels from it's backing.  Just as I had suspected, the labels weren't cut through and through and not one of them could be used. 

Maybe it was me.  Maybe I shouldn't wrap gifts before 9 on a Sunday, but what the heck, how could I have this many problems.   I checked the labels, they were all made by Wal-Mart's Holiday Time line of wrapping.  If three products in the line were faulty, then maybe Wal-Mart should look into taking the months of October and November to practice quality control, and roll out their products in December after Thanksgiving instead of before Halloween.