Please Keep Blood off Gifts
Picture Santa’s workshop from December 1-24. Then picture busy elves like me wrapping elegant gifts in an “ultra-haute” store a few eons ago.
In my first life, which took place a few hundred years ago, there were a few magazines I didn’t work for. One of them was Good Housekeeping. I didn’t even know what that meant. Maybe how to keep a house?
My own infrequent housekeeping occurred slightly more often than meteor strikes. With intense concentration, I could wash the floor. I could, but I didn’t tend to. I pushed a broom once in the ’60s for a job at a ranch in Wyoming. Not for one month or one year. No, just that once. Then I peeled and sliced potatoes three times a day and was pretty good at that.
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The foreman was named Red and his wife was Maxine. She woke me at 4 A.M. each day. Then we fed 65 seasonal ranch hands from nearby Reservations. While they were called “Indians,” I was called “Yankee” and was 16. One day, I drove to the Post Office, well, just a little bit into the Post Office, breaking some U.S. Government glass. It was my first time driving a stick and my last day employed at the ranch.
Hippies came to The Haight to inhale and indulge. Cops came to contain or arrest. Reporters came to write it up with speed, as in with amphetamine. Photographers came loaded with film, or just loaded. There were 100,000 hippies plus sex, drugs, rock ’n roll, and one former kitchen girl on the lam. It was the Age of Aquarius.
That’s how I got to San Francisco. Hippies came to The Haight to inhale and indulge. Cops came to contain or arrest. Reporters came to write it up with speed, as in with amphetamine. Photographers came loaded with film, or just loaded. There were 100,000 hippies plus sex, drugs, rock ’n roll, and one former kitchen girl on the lam.
It was the Age of Aquarius. Every wall sported psychedelic signs with quotes like, “LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it” (Timothy Leary); “Avoid All Needle Drugs — The Only Dope Worth Shooting is Nixon” (Abbie Hoffman); “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me” (Hunter S. Thompson).
Hippies woke up at 3 or 4 PM each day, ingested, then ambled out to panhandle at the aptly named Panhandle Park. They also hit up their parents for cash and prevented the Panhandle from being replaced by a freeway. If built, the freeway would have saved commuters six minutes between downtown and the Golden Gate Bridge.
I smoked weed, if offered, but did not do meth, cocaine, or LSD. I worked two jobs, got maced, attended classes at UC Berkeley. One was part-time, at the Asian Art library. This was during the war in Vietnam, which wasn’t a war. It was a conflict that caused peaceful protests which were met with well-armed troops composed of State Police, City Police, County Police, University Police, and the National Guard, outfitted with gas masks to prevent now-dubbed criminal demonstrations. Technically, more than two students in any one place was a demonstration, and even peaceful demonstrations were a threat to peace, while tear gas and mace were not.
My other job was off campus, where I checked endless boxes and wrapped countless pricey packages at an ultra high-end store, which was packed with patrons purchasing whozits and whatsits galore. At Christmas, they opted for wrapping paper with angels or reindeer or endless Noels. ’Twas the season to be shopping, I mean, ‘twas the season to be jolly, but some customers weren’t. They were tired and tense, having busted their tails for a few hours to spend what wrappers might earn in a year.
And we wrappers? We were covered with paper cuts while surrounded by signs—well-hidden inside our bustling booth—that said “Please Keep Blood Off Gifts.” Out of view below the signs were Band-Aids. But we carried on, trying to look “calm yet festive” as instructed by our boss. We were dressed as elves. My belt was big and my cheeks were red to match the jaunty jacket and hat, both of which made me feel itchy and hot, as a set of ten Christmas tunes played on endless repeat.
I worked two jobs, got maced, attended classes at U.C. Berkeley. One was part-time, at the Asian Art library. My other job was off campus, where I checked endless boxes and wrapped countless pricey packages at an ultra high-end store. We wrappers were covered with paper cuts while surrounded by signs—well-hidden inside our bustling booth—that said “Please Keep Blood Off Gifts.” Out of view below the signs were Band-Aids.
At non-holiday times, I also served as Assistant Head Wrapper, with birthdays in color, and weddings all white. Like our customers, who were all white, too. At lunch break, which lasted 15 minutes, I read anthropology texts and studied yams, or rather, the culture of the Trobriand Islands, where yams were the currency. Then I returned to bleeding-then-blotting birthday and wedding gifts.
One woman asked us to wrap her in minimal clothing as a gift for her fiancé. We had to decline. One man asked us to wrap a Mercedes. Another asked us to wrap a llama. For that, we settled on one large, but very soft velvety bow that perfectly matched the llama’s large velvety eyes.
A few years later, I landed a much easier, though related job speed-wrapping stories with quick, clever words. I knew where to start, how to end, and where to go in between with just the right number of seconds and words. The world of publishing—whether books or magazines—had always been a bastion of elitism. To enter, you needed blue blood and connections. I didn’t have them. To succeed, you needed them even more. I still didn’t have them. I had no keys to any kingdom, knew nothing of trends, fashion, celebrities, food, clubs, wealth.
Magazines were vibrant and bustling and cool then. Some were very cool. Freelancers took people we didn’t know to places we hadn’t seen, connecting, combining, and cutting with just the right words in just the right number. Places they would love—tucked between perfect covers, like wrapping at Christmas, beribboned and gleaming under the tree. It wasn’t all the news. Just all the news that fit just right at magazines like New York and Vogue and Vanity Fair. Then magazines were subsumed by the iceberg known as the internet. As you may have deduced, I’m nearing the age of some antiques. The mid-century kind.
Back in the booth, when I was a wrapper, the store’s motto was, “We believe in unique and high-quality wrapping solutions for discerning customers. And that every gift, no matter how big or small, deserves to be adorned with care.” They might have added, “Plus we keep blood off gifts.” A lot of things have changed. Now we use Kraft paper and a sprig of pine, or just stick gifts in bags.
But some things have stayed the same, which brings us to Santa. Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second.
One woman asked us to wrap her in minimal clothing as a gift for her fiancé. We had to decline. One man asked us to wrap a Mercedes. Another asked us to wrap a llama. For that, we settled on one large, but very soft velvety bow that perfectly matched the llama’s large velvety eyes.
That means that for each eligible home, Santa would have 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, place gifts under the tree, eat cookies, drink milk, get back up the chimney, and back in the sleigh. Which has Santa’s speed at 650 miles per second or 3,000 times the speed of sound. To achieve that with 300 tons of gifts, Santa would need not the fabled eight or nine, but 214,000 reindeer instead.
This brings us to Albert Einstein. The man we associate with genius had this to say about imagination: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” He also said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.” I believe in gifts and words and miracles.
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REFRESHING!!! So nice to read something here that doesn’t raise my blood pressure- just my spirits!! Thank you and Happy, Merry everything!!🤗🤗
What a sparkling memoir to read this icy day in NYC. I worked in Bloomingdale's one Christmas, okaying every return because I couldn't remember any other procedure.