Boxing Day

I just got bopped in the head by an avalanche of cardboard boxes falling on my head. Again. I have a closet shelf devoted just to boxes but they have evolved over the years from lightweight gift boxes to mostly heavy cardboard boxes that come by UPS or in the mail.  Those hurt more. I don't know what it is.  I just can't seem to throw a box away.  You never know when you are going to need one for some reason or another.

It is very satisfying to be able to nest them together and stack them on the shelf.  For years I have had gift boxes, collected from Christmases, birthdays and, of course, the neighbor's trash (what was she thinking throwing away perfectly good boxes like that?). Any time you need to wrap a gift, I am ready.  Lots of them still have tissue paper in them too. I have a suit box from Dillards's, smaller shirt boxes and dress boxes from Penney's and Sears and various department stores, a square one from Children's Place.  Some of them fold up flat, others fit into the next one up and there are sizes all the way from the suit box to teeny ring boxes.  The littlest boxes have cotton in them to hold precious jewelry, like necklaces made from soda bottle tabs that don't come with their own containers  from the store. Here is a general guideline:  if you are shopping in a store that gives free gift boxes, ask for the box even if you are buying the item for yourself.  You can never have enough boxes.

When Josh first started college I sent him cookies each week in boxes that I covered with the Garfield comic strips, his favorite, that I cut out from that week's newspapers. I figured it would be a good way for him to get to meet new people in his dorm.  It was an adventure every week to find a box the right size.  Too small and the cookies wouldn't fit, too big and I had to send too many. (You have to save a few to eat yourself, of course.) It was before online shopping so that size box was hard to come by.

These days, when we shop online a lot, things come in heavy corrugated boxes and we tend to remove things from those boxes and place them in gift bags before giving (we recycle the gift bags in our family too, but that is another blog)   In case you need to mail something, you have it.  I have one cardboard box that my sister in Kansas and I sent back and forth to each other about seven times, just covering up the address with a new sticker.  It seemed like whatever we were sending always fit in that box.

I'm not as bad about hoarding, excuse me, I meant collecting, boxes as Dennis is.  At least my boxes all fit on that closet shelf.  Most of the time. Unless they get unbalanced and whack me in the head. Dennis collects the boxes that things come in from the store, like TVs or computers.  He wants to be ready if he ever has to send something back.  If they are giant, like computer boxes, I get to put them in the attic.  Others, like the electric toothbrush box or all the boxes from all the phones we have ever had or the camera boxes, are under his desk.  With some of them the toothbrushes and phones are long gone but he still has the boxes.  You can't reuse them or wrap anything in them because of the logos on them. Now, tell me. Who has the hoarding addiction here?

Cardboard mailing boxes are great to hold roly-poly bugs---just add grass---or turtles temporarily, when the grand kids are here. You can decorate boxes with stickers and markers and while away a whole afternoon sometimes. When we got a new toilet a couple of years ago our granddaughter, Miranda, found ways to play in the box it came in for about three months.  She covered up the words with duct tape so you didn't know it was from a toilet, then she could sit in it---it was just the right size---and close the flaps for her own secret hiding place.  It held bears and dolls and all kinds of things to make it a house for toys and graced our living room for longer than you can imagine.  I tried moving it into the garage once on the pretense of needing to vacuum, but she brought it back in the next time she was here.

The best boxes for kids, of course, are appliance boxes.  They make great forts and playhouses, especially if you cut windows in them. When our oldest son, Josh, was about a year old, he and I went on a business trip with Dennis. It didn't take Josh long to get bored with the few toys I had managed to pack into a small suitcase and Dennis had the rental car. I can't remember how I discovered that there was a refrigerator box on the other side of the golf course where we were staying in a guest house, but while Dennis was at work one afternoon, Josh and I walked across and dragged that box back, through sand traps and past water holes, golfers eyeing us suspiciously, and he had a fine time with it the rest of the week.

I may decide to look around for just one more box, a really big one.  I could fit the big boxes into it, then the medium boxes into them and still have room for a whole bunch of small boxes.  Then I could shove it into the closet where the boxes are attacking me now and put a box in front of the door to keep them all in there. Otherwise it might take boxing gloves to defend myself.