Day 7: Wrapping paper

So my family, when I was young, were not rich.  We weren’t dirt poor either but I do remember one year we ran out of wrapping paper.  I had a couple of gifts that I needed to wrap for friends and family. I asked my mom for some wrapping paper. We couldn’t find any. My mom remembered that we might have some scraps from previous years in the burn box.  We had two fireplaces in our home and we used to collect any paper and put it in a box so we could use it to start the fires. For some reason I can’t remember, I had to go out to the garden and grab some paper. I think my dad must have been burning some weeds or something but when I got to the paper of course it was all crumpled up and smelled like smoke. The funny thing is I still used it. I wrapped my presents in wrinkled old smelly paper. The ones that stayed in our home and went under the tree smelled horrible. It seems my family wasn’t really great at stocking wrapping paper (or maybe my mom just used everything we had on the door) because I can also remember wrapping things with the Sunday funnies or brown paper from a grocery sack. Have you ever had to come up with a creative way to wrap a present? Since that experience I try to have wrapping paper in our home at all times. It is good, though, to remember the lesson we learn from the grinch “What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.” So no matter if you have wrapping paper or even presents remember the season and what it is really about. We don’t need fancy paper or presents to have a wonderful Christmas season.