Perfect present presentation

Got any ideas for how to wrap that set of golf clubs your husband wanted for Christmas? Unsure of how to disguise the CDs or gift certificates you got for the kids? Ask the experts what to do.

Scotch brand tape is sponsoring a wrapping hotline Dec. 23 and 24 to help people with their gift-wrapping dilemmas. This is the first year for the hotline, but organizers are ready for any of the questions that might come their way.

A panel of experts, some of whom are professional gift-wrappers, will be on hand to answer questions about what to do when you run out of paper or how to wrap odd-shaped gifts.

"People who call the hotline may be less inclined to wrap their gifts," said Amy Coles with Hunter Public Relations, who helped set up the hotline.

Many people believe that wrapping gifts is actually worse than shopping, cleaning the house or even taking out the trash.

More than one-third of Americans surveyed by 3M said they wait until the last minute to wrap their gifts.

And those last-minute wrappers often run into trouble. They find that they're short of some basic supplies: wrapping paper, tape and ribbons.

People who shop at Carlton Cards at Westfield Shoppingtown West Park in Cape Girardeau often ask about how much paper they'll need to wrap a gift, said assistant manager Josh Mize.

"A lot of times, men are happy with putting it in a plastic sack and tying a knot," he said.

Gift bags have been a saving grace for the wrapping challenged, he said. But plenty of people have trouble with odd-shaped gifts.

"Last year we had a guy with a guitar and that was tricky," Mize said. What the pair decided to do was to put the guitar in a much larger box than it needed and to weight it down so it wouldn't seem as light as a guitar or resemble one. "If we'd have wrapped the guitar by itself you would have known what it was," he said.

There isn't one particular trick in wrapping a gift, other than to make sure you have enough paper to cover all the edges. But then sometimes that doesn't even help.

Mize said he even had trouble wrapping a gift in a new line of homemade paper offered by the greeting card store. "Tape didn't stick to it and you could see through it. I ended up giving the roll of paper to the woman because we had to wrap it four times and you could still see through it."

So what should you do with some of those problem gifts you're trying to wrap?

Coles suggests "thinking outside the box" when it comes to strange shapes. If you've got a basketball or football, try putting it in some large fabric pieces or a pillowcase and tying the ends together. For items like bicycles or a new car, hide the gift and then wrap a picture of it or place clues throughout the house so the recipient can go on a scavenger hunt for it.

Coles said that when people are faced with a challenging gift to wrap, 50 percent of them will leave it unwrapped.

"We're encouraging people to wrap it instead. That's the spirit of the hotline," she said.

ljohnston@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 126