Wrapping up with the final word on Christmas presents

Why don't Christmas presents all come in square boxes as standard? I mean have you ever tried to wrap a toy car in a multi-angled box and not lost the will to live?

And anyway how would you disguise a football so that it looks like anything other than......a football?

Is there a way of hiding the fact that you're giving someone a CD – and short of putting a book in a shoebox, it will always look like a book.

A bottle of wine would look like a bottle of wine even if you wrapped it in a blanket, despite the fact that drinks companies – and whiskey distillers in particular – are doing their best to come up with a presentation box. But now you have to wrap a cylinder, which is fine until you try to tidy up the wrapping paper at either end.

Then there's the possibility of mistaken identity – like if you bought your loved one a very practical iPod Nano – and it's mistaken in a rush of excitement for a little box with a much more romantic, but non-existent, ring.

At the end of the day, no matter what you do, once the presents go under the tree, little fingers begin to poke holes in the vulnerable parts of the wrapping to see if a glimpse of what lies beneath can clear up any remaining mystery as to its identity.

So quite honestly there's little point in bothering with all that wrapping – particularly when you're ultimately going to be left with yards of coloured paper at a time of the year when they bin is overflowing and the next collection – if you live in Galway city anyway – isn't until the middle of January.

You can of course put your purchase into one of those present bags so that nobody has a clue what it is and you'll also save yourself a fortune in Sellotape. But frankly if you want to give a present in a bag, you might as well just leave it in the one you bought it in.

Wrapping a square or rectangular box is child's play; you need a scissors and some sticky tape, with a kitchen table on which to perform your task as an added bonus.

But wrapping the equivalent of an octopus would require the dexterity of an acrobat......and the patience of Mother Teresa.

Of course all of this is a precursor to the real stress – have you bought something that is remotely appropriate or appreciated or, for the ninth year in a row, have you made a complete bags of it?

And how are you supposed to react when someone thinks they've bought you the best present ever and it's taking you all your time not to throw up all over it.

I've been given tickets for concerts by bands I wouldn't go to see if they were playing at the end of the garden; one year I even got meat – loads of it – and on more than one occasion the present I didn't jump with delight on opening was taken back and exchanged....but the resulting voucher or refund never made it back to me.

It’s a sort of a variation on the ‘dog isn’t just for Christmas’ line – because in my case sometimes a present is just for Christmas and it has to go back where it came from in the New Year.

The other problem with presents for kids is the small pieces that go along with the ship or the castle or the doll’s house.

Because there’s nothing quite like the imprint of a little figurine or a piece of Lego in the soul of your bare foot on a cold January morning to wake you up cursing Santa and vowing to write to him to ask him to just give vouchers to everyone next time he’s dropping in.

See full column in this week's Connacht Tribune.