Our special Christmas series continues, bringing the plotline to a blood-pumping boil! Where will it all end? Find out on Christmas day!

You know what always ends up being a last-minute holiday purchase, for me? Wrapping paper. I just don't think about it -- it's not a necessary element of the gift-giving process as it applies to simply transferring ownership of a parcel to another person. On birthdays, other similar gifting occasions, I generally just do the ol' "Surprise!" maneuver, pulling the unwrapped package from behind my back. If it's really big I just hide it behind some furniture and point.

Christmas, though, is special. There are different expectations so far as decoration, presentation, and other aesthetic concerns, like making sure my packages blend in with the pile of others under my parents' Christmas tree. Silly concerns, to be sure, but valid in context, and almost never even considered in any detail until about three days before Christmas... which it now is.

I suppose I should also mention that I can't wrap a present worth a crusty hairball. Any gift wrapped by me invariably ends up using twice the paper and three times the tape as those of other, more-competent people. In this context, it's possible that putting off buying wrapping paper is merely an avoidance technique -- although, if we're going to analyze it that far, we might as well just accept that the whole affair is a blanket metaphor for failure, and use the saved time to write bad poetry.

All the same, I miss the days when I could just pay my sister to wrap the darned things.