Gift tags, among other things

A very merry Christmas season to you all!

It has become obvious at my house that the birth of our Lord is coming very soon, and with it all those odd and traditional tasks that take over one's living room. Presently the area between the couch and fireplace and TV is overwhelmed with brilliant tissue-papers and red and silver papers and broad ribbons in tupperware bins, with a great many tea cups and CDs and movies in between. (Because, of course, we like to drink tea and watch movies while wrapping!) Dad expressed it rather well, the other night, by saying it looked like Christmas had struck.

Last night, all during X-Men II, I made a dozen or two gift tags. We hardly ever buy them; why bother, when all you need is a bit of cardstock and a stamp? I've got seven or eight colors of ink and a whole boxful of mouse-stamps, not to mention colored pencils to bring out the red of their peppermint swirls and Santa hats, and so I sent them dancing across the paper-scraps.

One series of tags featured a little one peeking out from an ornament, hat dangling. The next showed a mouse overcome by the glories of peppermint, trying to stuff the entire sweet in his mouth at once. Another had a mousely maestro, sheet music and stick in hand. The stamp didn't show his orchestra, so for each tag I got to invent one for him. One director got a flock of bluebirds (yesterday we had a brilliant bluebird sitting above our garage), and another a whole blizzard of snowflakes from my little snowflake punch, and a third got a snowstorm of little Celtic knots, and a fourth the stars of the sky, like Milo in The Phantom Tollbooth. Another series had an artistic mouse, reaching up to paint. In the spring, I find that mouse usually paints flowers or butterflies, but last night he preferred ornaments and stars dangling from garlands.

This morning I thought perhaps what I needed for my next gift tags were quotes about wrapping things in brown paper. This naturally led to Chesterton's chalk essay. I pulled it up and read it (one should read Chesterton very often), and discovered what I ought to have known anyway, that while Chesterton is extremely quotable, it's hard to reduce him to quote-sized bits. He's sort of long-winded just for the fun of it.

I love the way Chesterton goes to draw, despite no particular artistic ability. That's kind of the way--most of us are, actually. Wrapping presents is an art that most of us have to do whether we can or not, and so, I would suggest, is making gift tags. It's a happy thing, especially if you have lots of colored chalks or pencils at your disposal. So, not at all pretending to be anything like complete, I will quote the first two paragraphs of Chesterton on chalk, and include the link, which you may consider a hint to go read it in its entirety. :-)

I remember one splendid morning, all blue and silver, in the summer holidays when I reluctantly tore myself away from the task of doing nothing in particular, and put on a hat of some sort and picked up a walking-stick, and put six very bright-coloured chalks in my pocket. I then went into the kitchen (which, along with the rest of the house, belonged to a very square and sensible old woman in a Sussex village), and asked the owner and occupant of the kitchen if she had any brown paper. She had a great deal; in fact, she had too much; and she mistook the purpose and the rationale of the existence of brown paper. She seemed to have an idea that if a person wanted brown paper he must be wanting to tie up parcels; which was the last thing I wanted to do; indeed, it is a thing which I have found to be beyond my mental capacity. Hence she dwelt very much on the varying qualities of toughness and endurance in the material. I explained to her that I only wanted to draw pictures on it, and that I did not want them to endure in the least; and that from my point of view, therefore, it was a question, not of tough consistency, but of responsive surface, a thing comparatively irrelevant in a parcel. When she understood that I wanted to draw she offered to overwhelm me with note-paper.

I then tried to explain the rather delicate logical shade, that I not only liked brown paper, but liked the quality of brownness in paper, just as I like the quality of brownness in October woods, or in beer. Brown paper represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-coloured chalk or two you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green, like the first fierce stars that sprang out of divine darkness. All this I said (in an off-hand way) to the old woman; and I put the brown paper in my pocket along with the chalks, and possibly other things. I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too
long; and the age of the great epics is past.