All wrapped up in shiny paper

Getting ready for the Christmas party.  Like I haven’t been doing that since the week before Thanksgiving.  I have to give myself time, because this is the one good setting-in-order the house will get for a year.  I figure, if I want to be ready to babysit the Christ child, I gotta get rid of all the allergens. And so, the raw materials of a years’ worth of projects and mayhem are tamed for the nonce, though they are all attached by rubber bands to their usual places and will find them again even before the New Year rings in, I am certain.

And while I am settling the last minute details for this old, old party, I am wrapping my homemade ornament, and I am thinking about what I lousy job I always do of that.  Once upon a time, before I became a mother and started opening the packages of kids’ underwear and wrapping every single individual piece (I do love a mound of presents under the tree), I prided myself in my creative and craftswomanly approach to gift wrapping.  I even made sure the patterns were all matched at the edges, and I’ve been known to make my own bows.  But necessity became the mother of whipping it through, and tape now covereth a multitude of sins.

So, here I am wrapping this thing with more of an eye to safety than to aesthetics, and it gives me pause.  Some of the dear and ancient friends who have come to this thing for decades take great pains over their wrapping.  Some day, I will have to do an anthropological study of this—the relationship of outward wrapping to inward investment of time, talent and skill?  Maybe there isn’t one.  And if there is, maybe we would find it surprising. 

And as I think further, I realize that I’m making a sloppy job of it—as I seem to do every year—on purpose.  And I wonder why?  Because of the fairy tales that teach us that ugly outside hides the best hearts?  Hmmmm.  Not only non-scientific, but dangerous.  Because I want to reward the person who is integral enough to take a chance on a less than attractive exterior?  Are these last two points the same, or no?

And then I remember my friend, Catherine the Gorgeous and Classy from Germany and New York, who—during a chance and momentary reunion with me at BYU—once remarked, “You could look good if you’d just take care of yourself.”  It was too sharp a bodkin for me to realize at the time how deep a wound that had made.  Because truely, I pretty much thought I had been taking care of myself. 

And next I hear echoes of my maternal grandmother, who lived with us when I was little; more than once she had declared in a sort of social horror, “I don’t have my lipstick on!  I certainly can’t step out of this house!”  (You have to hear that in a deep southern accent.)

The second echo is from a time when I was home in Texas for Christmas, near the end of my Bachelor’s time and still inexorably and helplessly baching it in my life.  I did have to stop and wonder, being the kind of girl I was (the kind that married men liked, shaking their heads and saying, “What’s wrong with those guys?”)—what, exactly, was wrong with me.  And here was my grandmother saying to me, “You’re too smart for them boys, sugar.  That’s what’s wrong.  You gotta play dumb.  You gotta play dumb for those boys.” She said this not once, but over and over—just another symptom of her encroaching dementia.

I was a child of the sixties, and that statement of hers pretty much set my underclothes on fire.  But in any age, I never could have heard such a thing without wanting to chew furniture. The sum total of my resolve after all of these things was an undying pledge that I would NOT “take care,”  I would not EVER wear lipstick, and I would never, NEVER misrepresent my mind in order just to get a bite on my line.  Because I could not imagine for one second wanting to set a hook into a person whose attention must be caught and held by any such things.

I’m afraid I’ve passed that kind of thinking on to my daughters.  WYSIWYG.  I have to admit that I did cave when it came to the lipstick.  You couldn’t get your lips white enough in the late sixties without it.  And I went right ahead taking care of myself the way I always had—doing my best to look like my own little self, the best and flipping cutest I could manage.  I still don’t quite know what else Catherine expected me to do?  Surgery?

So maybe I just feel affinity for this little gifty I am wrapping.  It’s a great thing.  A lovely, quality thing—I think.  Maybe Catherine wouldn’t think so (she’s a wonderful person, though, by the way).  Maybe I’m just thinking that this little gift doesn’t need to advertise itself—because I do know for sure that tonight it will be discovered—maybe not first, but eventually.  And that its beauty will be appreciated—for what it’s worth to each set of eyes.

So now you may ask me: then why are you cleaning the house?

And I smile.

Women are so complex.