Christmas Packaging: A true story, mostly

It was a couple of weeks before Christmas, when I was in that blessed age of late childhood, 10 or 11 years old, mature enough to understand most things but not yet subject to the madness of adolescence.  Time still moved slowly for me in those days, and I was looking forward to the endless freedom of the holiday vacation.

 Walking through the door as I came home from school that day, I found my Dad sitting on the couch in the living room, staring balefully at something on the coffee table.  He did well to be unhappy:  the object was none other than the more-or-less annual Christmas package from Uncle Sebastian.

 Uncle Sebastian was Dad's brother, a man known in a family full of eccentrics as especially peculiar.  Early on, before I understood much about either geography or the strange cast of characters that made up my relatives, he was just some distant relation living in the mysterious "west", who sent oddball gifts from time to time, either for birthdays or Christmas.  Once I began to be concerned about such things, I asked my Dad about him.

 "He lives in rural Montana," Dad said.

 I interjected, "Isn't 'rural Montana' a redundancy?" delighted at the opportunity to demonstrate both my burgeoning vocabulary and growing understanding of geography.

 "Hmmm," Dad responded, "You have a point there.  There isn't any place in Montana that's even close to urban.  But your Uncle Sebastian lives in one of the most rural areas of the state, over by the Idaho border.  A place so desolate you have to drive 300 miles in order to enter the twentieth century."

 Why Uncle Sebastian had chosen to live in such an out-of-the-way place was anyone's guess, but our family being what it was, there was no dearth of opinions.  Dad thought maybe he just felt uncomfortable around people, and disliked the twentieth century.  You couldn't find a better place than rural Montana if you felt like that.  Mom told me she thought it was an act of charity.  When I asked what she meant, she explained, "Any member of your Dad's family who chooses to live away from other people is probably doing the rest of us a favor."

 Whatever his reasons for living where he did, Uncle Sebastian seemed devoted to inflicting his diabolical packages on people in more civilized places.  The gifts weren't diabolical at all:  to the contrary, they were some of the most interesting I received during my childhood.  One year it was a Leatherman tool, the first of those I had ever seen;  another year it was an intricately painted egg;  in yet another year it was a set of miniature, but quite functional binoculars.  My sister still treasures her "elephant box."  One year my Mom got a box of lemon cake mix (she never did decide whether he was sending some sort of message).  Not everyone got a present every year, although there were years when everyone got them.  When that happened, our house became a swap meet.  Ordinarily it isn't considered good practice to trade away your Christmas gifts, but Uncle Sebastian's gifts just somehow seemed to demand further action.

 The gifts weren't diabolical, but the wrapping was.  Imagine some small item - a Leatherman tool, for example - swathed in dish towels or wash cloths or whatever fabric was available at the moment, the fabric bound with tape.  When I say "bound", I don't mean that a couple of loops of tape had been wound around the fabric:  what I mean is that every square centimeter was covered in several layers of tape, built up lovingly until it had become a single complex sheet of tough material.  The tape might be duct tape, or rarely masking tape, but as time went on the wrapping increasingly was composed of clear plastic package tape.  You've seen the stuff: it's about 3 inches wide, and is ubiquitous around the holidays.  But I think Uncle Sebastian obtained his supply from some military source:  the stuff was so tough it could probably have substituted for Kevlar.

 Once the fabric bundle had been suitably covered, at least two layers of bubble wrap were added, again thoroughly covered in layer after layer of tape.  Then came at least three layers of colorful paper, each covered in its turn.  The paper might be holiday wrapping paper, but more often included magazine covers, old book jackets, wallpaper remnants, outdated calendars, and the like.  An address label was affixed to the final paper layer, which was always covered with at least six layers of clear plastic tape.

 The resulting package was an odd-shaped colorful bundle certain to contain something interesting, if you could only find a safe way to open it.  With an ordinary Christmas package it's pretty simple:  find a seam, place your box cutter along the seam, and make a shallow cut.   The thing pops open easily.  Uncle Sebastian's packages had no discernible seams, involved multiple layers of wrappings, and always involved the risk that a cut too deep would damage the contents.  I still remember the cloud of lemon cake mix exploding out of the package one year, when Dad got a bit too aggressive in his attempt to open the package.  The living room smelled like lemons for weeks.

 Opening one of Uncle Sebastian's packages thus became a combination surgery-archeology-demolition event.  You couldn't be sure what lay below the surface, or how deep, or how fragile, or how valuable, and I assure you that a substance made of many layers of plastic tape, paper, and fabric is unremittingly stubborn.  You can't just cut into it, for fear you might damage something underneath: you have to more or less peel it back layer by layer.  And of course one layer adheres to the other, and because the layers are made of crisscrossing tape applications, they never come away neatly.  And it's never clear where one layer begins and another ends.  Unwrapping one of these packages could take hours.  Over the years, the unwrapping process had become a family Event.

 I was the last to arrive home that day.  Everyone else had been waiting for my arrival for some time.  Dad had not wasted the time, using it to assemble the standard toolkit for opening one of Uncle Sebastian's packages:  a box cutter; the titanium scissors from his workshop (he had broken more than one pair of less durable scissors in previous years);  two pairs of locking pliers for peeling away layers of the package;  chisels in various sizes; a hammer; a dovetail saw; bandaids and Iodine.  And a pressure bandage, just in case.  More than one injury had been sustained in this process, over the years.

 The package this year was unusually large, and relatively rectangular, about 12 inches long by about 10 inches square in cross section.  I remarked that it looked like he had put everything in a box this year, but Dad remarked, cynically, "That's what he wants us to think.  He's just built it up layer by layer to resemble a box, but I'll bet it's mostly tape and paper, with some tiny little item way down in the center.  We'll have to dig for hours to get to it."

 As Dad began the process of opening the package, we all sat forward expectantly.  I confess that my motives on these occasions weren't entirely pure.  Dad used language when opening Uncle Sebastian's packages that he rarely used otherwise, and of course there was always the possibility that he would injure himself:  to a preadolescent boy, that is spectacle of the most enthralling sort.  My sister and brother were equally enraptured.  Mom just looked worried.

 The process of peeling away the topmost layers took several minutes.  And then suddenly Dad sat back, surprised at what he'd found.  "It is a box!"  He exclaimed.  Still, fearing there might be some hidden surprise left in the upper level, he meticulously dissected the rest of the upper level, leaving a pile of paper and tape next to the coffee table.  When this was done, he peered inside.  "Dish towels?"  he demanded.  "All that for dish towels?"

 Mom came over and looked into the box.  It did seem to contain dish towels, neatly folded.  She did something Dad would never have dared to do:  she reached into the box and removed the towels.

 Below the dish towels was another package, bound in bubble wrap.  Dad groaned, but then painstakingly cut his way through the bubble wrap and the tape that covered it.

 And five small packages fell out, one for each of us.  Packages covered in colorful paper, and bound in layer after layer of clear plastic tape.   Dad groaned.