Wrapping Presents - O Joy!

We are super organized this year. All of our major shopping is done and we decided to sit down last night, pop in a movie and wrap presents. More accurately, Mike got the itch to wrap - ever the procrastinator, I could care less and could wait until Chrismas Eve to wrap. Which is contradictory to the fact that I want total artistic control of wrapping - I want the full say in how everything is presented and wrapped and color-coordinated. C'mon - how much fun is it to pick out paper and a color scheme and put it together in a perfect Martha Stewart presentation? Actually, it usually looks better in my imagination than when I'm finished. The irony is that Mike and I both had the same idea for wrapping this year - plain brown mailing paper with ribbons or raffia. Mike even went the extra mile and bought rubber stamps and ink. Um - who are you and what did you do with my husband?? However, Mike can attest to the fact that I suck at wrapping. Give me a box or square edge to wrap and I can sort of make it look decent.

I forgot that I married a wrapping perfectionist whose mother is the epitome of perfection when it comes to wrapping with no wrinkles. Good lord. I was ripping paper and waving scissors around in an attempt to cut raffia and battling the corners of boxes and funny shaped objects. Tape and raffia discards and brown paper lay in a turbulent pile around me. I glanced up while struggling to get the tape to stick to the heavy-duty paper, and there is Mike, cool as a cucumber, cutting a straight, smooth line while presents sit to the side with perfectly pressed, articulated corners. He's on his third gift. I'm starting on my second. He refuses to let me stamp the paper and emboss the prints with a heat gun because its too much fun (he just discovered how fun it is to watch the embossing powder turn the ink into a new, magical color!). I could not get near the heat gun all night as a result.

Which was ok. I gave up in frustration, grabbed my watercolors and finished watching Oceans Eleven doing some random painting which we will probably end up using for our Christmas cards.