12/22/05: Hallmark! The Herald Angels Si-Hing! "It's just wrapping paper." No, it ain't just wrapping paper. Wrapping paper can be just as important as the gift itself -- sometimes even more so! For every Christmas Eve throughout childhood and well into adulthood, I had the home field advantage of the celebration being hosted at my parents' house -- my turf. We're a big family, and everyone gets everyone else presents. There was only so much room in my parents' house, necessitating the breakdown of all the people and food upstairs, and all of the presents and prying eyes downstairs. This was my shot, year after year. Those poor saps would sit upstairs, fat and oblivious for hours on end as I carefully pulled all of my gifts from the bags upon bags. I'd eventually end up with a pile of all my presents, conveniently bunched for the midnight hour when I'd finally be allowed to open them. Those minutes and hours felt like years, but inspecting the size and the shape and the weight and the clickity clang sounds of the many wrapped gifts helped pass the time and keep me sane. It's amazing how much stock I put into what kind of wrapping paper surrounded the individual gifts. Fancy, heavy stock wrapping paper with shiny glitter effects always had me believing that the gift was going to be golden, while shoddy, holly-drenched flimsy paper sold in K-Mart 8-packs could've only been hiding crap. There was no science to the process, of course -- my theories were often proved wrong. But for all the senses of wonder and anticipation as I stared at those gifts from 3 PM - 12 AM, yeah, I'd say wrapping paper is more than just wrapping paper. It's rapping paper. Pung fft fft bam zap. By the time I approached and meandered through my teenage years, I figured out that nobody was really paying attention, and could just slice the side of the wrapping paper without a care in the world to sneak a peak. It ruined the drama and suspense, but at least I didn't piss the walls with excitement thinking I was getting a Super Nintendo when all I was getting was Trivial Pursuit: The In-A-Box-Shaped-Like-An-SNES-Box Edition. God, that was a sucky year. Today's commercial comes to us from Hallmark, and it's all about wrapping paper. Pung fft fft bam zap. Yo me and my homey Scotty Tape. Click here to download this commercial! (.WMV, 5 MB) ....close this window!