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I received a lot of really nice gifts for Christmas last year. I am still trying to get some of them open!

My granddaughter gave me a new curling iron. It was in a plastic box inside another plastic box. I borrowed my son-in-law's pocketknife to try to open it but it wasn't sharp enough. I grabbed the kitchen scissors out of the sink, but they had turkey skin on them so I gave that up for the moment.

After trying to open the curling iron and giving up, I unwrapped "The Devil Wears Prada." It was on my "wish" list. We agreed to watch it after presents were all opened. The movie was in a box that normally holds 10 reams of paper so I wouldn't guess what it was. Inside that box were several other boxes, some bricks and a bunch of old magazines! Way down inside I found the movie. Yay!! I love that movie! We set it aside to watch later.

I gave my grandson a box of "army men." He loves coming over to my house and playing with what seems like thousands of army men that he keeps in a box in the den. This Christmas gift added another very large platoon to an already large enough army to take over the world. We had to go out to the garage to get a hammer to loosen the lid and then inside the plastic box (that we almost broke) were a bunch of soldiers wrapped in yet another layer of plastic and foam. He, being a determined little kid, kept us entertained for about an hour while he managed to rescue his army men from their packing. I now have army men all over the house - little bitty army men that the vacuum cleaner doesn't like!

When it was time to settle back and watch "The Devil Wears Prada," my granddaughter opened the outside wrapping. Then she took the cellophane off the next layer of what I guess is protection from theft and slit some things on all four sides with her fingernails. Then she opened the final packaging. She tried to get it out to slip it into the DVD player and there was some kind of a snap thingy that held it in the packaging! She became totally frustrated and stomped off to the bathroom to try her new lipstick.

No one else wanted to watch the movie bad enough to wrestle with the snap thingy so we played a Josh Groban CD (opened the year before), lit the fireplace, had a cup of steamy hot chocolate and let the army men attack. We agreed to watch "The Devil" when we have the patience to wiggle the snap thingy until it releases the movie. Listening to Josh Groban was probably a better decision anyhow. Josh and the fireplace calmed our nerves and the evening was beautiful, even if we couldn't get half of our gifts unwrapped.

But this year, all I want is a nice poinsettia to put on the coffee table! A tin of chocolate covered almonds would be great too! Nothing wrapped, please!

- Caroline O. Reid,

Caroline O. Reid, a writer in Bakersfield, Calif., retired twice - once from an executive administrative position for a major oil company and then from a part-time position in her daughter's consulting business. She now spends her time writing, submitting queries and reading rejection letters. She has been published twice in Chicken Soup for the Soul and wrote a humor column for a now-defunct local newspaper called The Northwest Voice. She freely shares her opinion in many published letters to the editor in the Bakersfield Californian.