We all float down here..

One thing I loathe about the holidays is the wrap. I love pretty, shiny, patterned wrapping paper. I do not like it when the pattern is:

Some fat man in a red suit and beard
Reindeer
Holly, mistletoe, evergreen, or any other poisonous tree
Anything remotely involving baby Jeebus or his family
Anything with words on it, unless they are swear words
Candles, menorah
Religious symbols of any kind whatsoever and ever amen
Red and white stripes, unless I am giving the gift to a barber
Red white and green in any combination
Snowflakes, snow drifts, or anything else that reminds me that it is not summer
Candy canes, ribbon candy
Christmas ornaments, jingle bells

I go out of my way to try to find nice, non-denominational wrap. This year was particularly difficult. I wound up going to the mall, in a last desperate attempt to find something. The mall was dead. No, really - dead. The only stores were cell phone kiosks, a Payless shoe store, a Piercing Pagoda, and the dollar store. Everything else was gone. Even the food court stores were gone. It was creepy. I kept expecting zombies. Sadly, there were none.

The dollar store had gift wrap. It was pretty and green and /exactly/ what I wanted, so I purchased the package of 3 varied rolls, some nice ribbon, and left.

When I got it home and started wrapping gifts, I saw that my pretty wrap has small white swastikas in the center of the design.

A brief Google tells me this was apparently a controversy a few weeks ago and most places stopped selling the wrap. Apparently not the store I was in. I, living in a news void on purpose, missed the outrage.

Being a person who has a clue about how the symbol evolved through the ages before that short, pasty-faced, ugly, genocidally inclined German dictator got his filthy Jew-hating hands on it, I am in no way offended by it on this paper.

I'm declaring this holiday season to be 'take back the symbol given a bad name by a genocidal fuckwad' and am using the wrap. It's Sanskrit, and it means 'good luck'.

(and yes.. it would probably have been easier to find the kind of gift wrap I want if I'd done my gift-wrap shopping before the day before Xmas eve.)

I'm just going to trust that anyone who's ever met me knows that I have secretly not been replaced with a Nazi sympathizer.