If you're wondering why your Christmas card has stickers sealing it, its because the humidity in my Providence apartment ruined the seal on the Christmas cards last summer. Now, I wasn't scooping up bargain priced Christmas cards after New Years 2004. I just had cards left over. Being a pack rat is a tradition in my family. But holidays have their own special pack rat tradition: the wrapping paper box.

I have two whole boxes devoted to Christmas stuff now, one for the fake tree and one for the ormanements, wrapping paper, cards, etc. It makes me feel like I've really gone somewhere in the world, because I now have holiday boxes. ;-) Of course perhaps this only makes sense when you understand that nobody ever, ever ripped the paper in my household. Our restraint was not out of natural inclination for tidiness, but because all wrapping paper was carefully folded and placed in the wrapping paper box, to be pulled out again next year. There is one steadily shrinking piece of Mickey Mouse paper that came from an aunt when I was in grade school that still resides in the wrapping paper box. We treat it with reverence, cutting from it only for the most special of gifts, and making sure it gets a nice safe place between the stiff, folded up JCPenny's boxes that also live in the big wrapping paper box.

Little poll? Anybody else's family grow up with a wrapping paper box? I'm genuinely curious.

*turning to a less rosy memory and to a more somber note*
You know though it's occurred to me a number of times recently, when I have stories that almost but sometimes not quite come off the tip of my tongue, that I will really have that whole cackling "When I was young missy, we walked barefoot to school " routine down pat when I'm old. And the stories will even be true. I don't find it sad, I find it amusing. I like our wrapping paper box.

I did wear those crappy black plastic hightops to school for awhile with my big toe sticking out of them . . . . it rained one day . . . Adam Carter, or was it Nicholas Orscheln, teased me about them . . . and I finally told Mom it was time for new shoes, and she sighed that "I know" sigh . . . those guys were always teasing me in grade school . . . that's a true story, too.

Funny though, even that one doesn't really make me sad. Just kind of feels weird to realize that wasn't normal. My sister Tamara *HATED* being . . . poor. Poor-ish. Were we poor? Wearing shoes like that classifies as poor to me but I never felt poor. I just felt like we didn't have any money. Besides, it made me tough - not in that fake "I'm just putting up a front" way, but in a genuine "Hey I can survive anything that doesn't kill me" way.

And I'm rather fond of the wrapping paper box memory, after all. I'm even starting my own. :-)