Family Daze
Homeless gifts are starting to show up in strange places
By Debbie Farmer
Now that Christmas is over the real challenge begins. Oh, I don't mean cleaning the house, or storing leftovers or taking down the tree and all that. I mean finding a place to put all of the remaining presents left under the tree.
This doesn't sound so difficult to those of you lucky enough to have a house the size of, say, New Jersey. But almost everyone knows that the presents left under the tree are there because, as interesting as they are, there is absolutely no room for them in your house, attic, basement, or possibly anywhere else on the entire planet. And, for lack of a better plan, you desperately stuffed them back underneath the tree to buy yourself more time.
Of course this is not a bad idea--until the day comes when the tree is carried away by a troop of Boy Scouts and you suddenly have a large pile of homeless gifts sitting out in the open, right next to the fireplace.
Somehow, I'm always shocked when this happens.
Oh, sure, there are plenty of strategies about what to do with these overflow gifts. For example, enterprising sorts will immediately take these gifts back to the store. The organized people will try to rearrange their closets to make more storage space. And the more thrifty types will stack the boxes according to size, then make, say, a nice little end table. However, since no one in my family displays any of these qualities, we stick to our usual plan of rotating the gifts to various places throughout the house until they either wind up lost or wedged behind the sofa.
One of the problems with this strategy is that I have to be prepared to answer all sorts of embarrassing questions from guests, such as "Why is there a 12-inch Volkswagen sitting on top of the ottoman?" Or "Did you know that there's a rubber bass named Billy singing 'Don't worry, be happy' propped up on the clothes hamper in the upstairs bathroom?"
Another problem is trying to sound normal as I explain that, yes, I do indeed know about the fish and the car, but I'm not too worried since they will only be staying there temporarily until they move on again.
However, the main problem with homeless presents is that with them floating around all over the place, you never know where they will turn up next.
For instance, one year, a large tin, filled with three different kinds of popcorn and decorated with a cheery little snow scene, somehow made its way from the kitchen to my daughter's bedroom, where it became a winter resort for gymnastics Barbie. A few weeks later it showed up in the living room where my son turned it into a Lego storage silo and then a steel drum when he started his reggae phase. By spring, it worked its way out the front door and down the driveway. It finally came to rest next to a small bush alongside the house where it now holds my potted geraniums.
I know I need a more practical solution to storing gifts. Perhaps one year I'll get around to cleaning out my closets or building a storage shed.
But this year, we were lucky. When we moved the Christmas tree, there was nothing hiding underneath except a papier mache horse with a clock in its stomach.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
