These are a few of my favorite things...

I am not sure many of you know this about me, but I LOVE to wrap gifts. I could do it all day everyday for a 100 years. OK, well I might be exaggerating just a bit. But I seriously would quit my job if I could make a career out of it. Secretly, I have always wished to work in the gift wrap department at a major department store. Oh...what fun I could have wrapping gifts all day. Who knows maybe one day I will open my own business purchasing gifts for busy executives.

Wrapping gifts in Sumatra is a lot more difficult than wrapping in the States. I like to think of it as "extreme" wrapping. It is an adventure from start to finish. First you have to hunt down the paper. Since Christmas is not celebrate by 98% of the people in Sumatra it makes finding paper a lot more challenging. When you do find it, its not exactly what we would consider Christmas chic. Think something more in line with a traveling carnival.

I am sure some of you now understand why I drug John all over Malaysia looking for wrapping paper. Poor guy! He never knew what he was getting himself into when he married me and my gift wrapping obsession. Till death do us part, right. ;0}

Evidently no one in Asia uses ribbon because it was MIA. I only saw ribbon at one store and it was definitely not what I was looking for. The term I think best describes it is "bedazzled". Luckily, I saved a good chunk of last year's ribbon. I had exactly enough to get some form of a bow on each of the kids gifts. It's not my best work but under the conditions it was the best I could do.

Once I had all my materials it was time to wrap. Wrapping paper doesn't come in giant Costco size rolls here in Indonesia. The rolls are tiny just about enough to wrap on small size shirt box. I had five rolls of that to cover all our gifts. One of the gifts is round which added an extra challenge to mix.

Remember in Geometry class when you thought yourself "I don't know why we have to learn this stuff. I will never use it again." Well, I was wrong. Mr. Carlson you were right. I did use my geometry skills. This task was made more difficult by the weight of my paper. Think rice paper or working with wet tissue paper. Not the easiest conditions but for a few of us extreme wrappers its what we live for.

The best part was that I do not have a scotch tape dispenser. I only had the roll of tape and the beginning was constantly getting lost. As difficult as it was I enjoyed every second of it. I know that Christmas is not about the wrapping or the gifts but I am sure thankful that God blessed us with coordinating ribbon and heavy weight wrapping paper. :0)