Every year when Christmas roles around, my friends and I do the same thing. We buy our gifts the day before Christmas. We bring the same exact gifts every year: brandy, cigars, cash, chocolate and wine. Usually, they’re the same exact gifts for the same exact people. Clearly, we are not Christmas aficionados. Or to put it bluntly: we’re selfish, lazy and uncreative. Sometimes people are offended by our gifts, which are wrapped in grocery store bags or boxes that aren’t big enough to fit a bottle of wine in. And to add insult to injury, we wrap our gifts only moments before waltzing into Christmas breakfast, lunch or dinner, hung over and most certainly late. Christmas is not our thing.

We decided that this year, we would try to change our ways.

We interviewed Brandy Angelique, a master gift wrapper at The Gilded Page about her thoughts on the importance of gift wrapping and giving.

SFR: What is the importance of properly wrapping a gift before giving it?

Brandy: I think what makes a gift special is how you present it. It has nothing to do with what’s inside as much, because it’s the thought that counts. But you can show someone that you’re really thinking about them by the way you present the item you’re giving them.

Do you have a special technique?

One other piece of important info is…

We wrap a gift for anyone, anywhere and we wrap gifts year round.

In the end, we realized our problems went beyond the gifts and the wrapping. The wounds ran much deeper.