Remember Christmas without Scotch Tape?

This year much of my cash will be going to buy pretty wrapping paper and ribbons. But the most important item I will need is an ample roll of Scotch Tape.

Remember those nights trying to make a pretty present with ordinary tape, string and GLUE. The glue was the important item, because when we folded the paper at the end, we needed something to hold things in place.

My oldest brother, Harold, would invariably come home fairly late in the evening following his rush trip to Peoples Drug Store. He would try to sweet talk Ellen and me to wrap his presents for him. We usually gave in and helped him. But it sometimes hurts when the rest of the family were arranging their presents around the big tree and Ellen and I were isolated in our bedroom with Harold’s presents! What made it worse was that he didn’t even stay to help us. But I will say he gave us very nice presents.

None of us gave each other expensive gifts but when a family of 10 each gave 10 presents to the other members, the pile would get higher and higher!

Then there were the joke presents like the fur-lined bathtub that Ralph made for Kathryn, (The bathtub came from my doll house, but I enjoyed being part of the joke)

A few days before Christmas Mama would take Ellen and me to the door of the 5 and 10-cent store and stand where we could see her while we each spent our dollar on a 10-cent gift for our siblings. I was very happy when Vernon praised my selection of a little yellow screwdriver that would fasten in his pocket.

Pauline Manning was the only little child of a nearby family, but she spent hours at our house and loved to join in the Gray’s antics. She got very expensive presents but she enjoyed watching our big variety of little gifts we gave each other. She could not wait to get to our gift exchange.

Some of the presents got rather worn before they got opened because without that new stuff (Scotch Tape) the paper would come loose at each end. Ordinary string would often substitute for ribbons, and we even used paper sack cut to fit for the wrappings.

Then Miriam came home for Christmas where she had been going to graduate school in New York City! She had discovered that you could buy wrapping paper and found something similar to Scotch Tape to fasten things together. We awed and awed at the fancy appearance of her gift! I’m sure she didn’t have the money for the extra looks, but we could see immediately which ones were Miriam’s gifts. We also could see which ones were Harold’s gifts that Ellen and I wrapped.

This year we have thought of having a grab bag for gifts and not bothering to wrap them. But I am sure we will still use paper from last year and maybe even buy some because now we can fasten them nicely with Scotch Tape.

Isn’t it wonderful that some little thing like tape can become an essential part of Christmas, but we still sometimes use a colorful Walmart bag to identify our gifts.

Christmas can be fun when it is not fancy, and it can be appreciated just as much, but I love to think back to the days when preparing for Christmas was fun instead of a burden.

Christmas is more fun now with our marvelous tape. My new carol goes something like this.

It is only one day till Christmas

We must make it look great

Because if we don’t make it pretty

We’ll know our present will break.

Chorus:

Sticky Tape, Sticky Tape

It’s great and it does the job

Sticky Tape, Sticky Tape

We sing of its greatness for the job.