Box Socials by W.P. Kinsella

Author:W.P. Kinsella [Kinsella, W.P.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 0002237520
Published: 2013-07-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

It was at the wedding of the Little American Soldier and the delicately constructed Lavonia Lakusta that I witnessed my first Presentation, a scene and event that I’ll never forget. The Presentation is, as far as I know, a rite, or ritual, or ceremony, unique to Ukrainian weddings. The English-speaking people in the Six Towns area, my daddy said, like our family, the McClintocks, and Mrs. Beatrice Ann Stevenson (even though she had been born Swedish and had become Icelandic by marriage), were called that because English was our first language, and though we were a minority in the Six Towns area, somehow considered our rites, and rituals, and ceremonies, more sensible than anyone else’s rites, and rituals, and ceremonies.

As a group, the English-speaking people in the Six Towns area collectively regarded the Presentation as barbaric, and when those English-speaking people got together with the Norwegian-speaking people, who were a majority in the Six Towns area, they consolidated, amalgamated, and joined their opinions together, to collectively denounce the Presentation as being just one step above dancing half-naked around a campfire.

My daddy said that it seemed to him, and after he pointed it out it also seemed to me, that it would have done most of the English-speaking people, and a majority of the Norwegian-speaking people, a whole lot of good to dance half-naked around a campfire for an evening or two. My daddy’s observation was that the English-speaking people he knew, and I think he probably included our family in with them, though he didn’t say so in case including our family in with them upset Mama, were generally stuffy, secretive, and often wore too many clothes at all times of the year.

At an English-speaking wedding, my daddy said, the guests tended to arrive bearing very securely wrapped presents. My mama, for her part, was a genuine expert at producing some of the most securely wrapped presents in the history of the world. Mama would place the gift in a cardboard box, the usually breakable gift item swaddled in something called excelsior, which according to our encyclopedia was fine curled shavings of wood forming a resilient mass, usually used to swaddle breakable items, though it sure looked like shredded paper to me. The excelsior came in delectable colors, yellows, reds, blues, silvers, and at its best looked like finely cut moonlight.

Mama would first wrap the gift box in white tissue paper, tying the package firmly with white string (I usually got to hold my finger on the knot), then she would cover the white-wrapped package with a layer of brown paper, tying the package firmly with heavy brown string, or binder twine (I would get to hold my finger on the knot again).

The wedding present would then be given its final covering, with whatever colored wrapping paper Mama could recycle from the two shopping bags of used wrapping paper she kept on a top shelf in the closet of her and Daddy’s bedroom, even though recycle wasn’t a word that had been invented yet.

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