Volunteer: Mother’s Day Gift Wrapping

Carousel shopping centre yesterday was crowded like never before. Seemed like everyone was rushing to find a last minute present for their mums. My mum is not here, nor Mother’s Day is part of my culture, however, I still joined the experience by being a volunteer, wrapping gifts to generate donations for Silver Chain.

It was such a nice volunteer work to do. I reckoned I could even do gift wrapping for a living. You see dad and kids shopping together trying to find a nice present for mum, young people rushing into the shopping centre for a reasonable gift and wrap it before rushing to another commitment, middle age men buying presents for their mothers, who may already be their children’s grandmothers… However it is, it’s still such a sweet thing to witness.

The job was also fun itself. My first gift to wrap when I just started the shift was a bigggggg knife set. Big and heavy. I had to wrap it twice to be able to cover the whole box, which was lame, because now thinking back, I realise it was such a stupid thing because I totally could wrap it with only one round. But that’s also the thing I was proud of myself, I made lots of mistakes and screwed quite a few things, but I covered them equally well, and still managed to look professional . That’s the point of the job: most of the time customers came up with very odd-shaped presents (like clothes, very often, or oversized boxes, or they wanted to combined two different shaped presents in one gift), you were puzzled inside, but you still had to look like you knew exactly what to do with them. Like an expert wrapper!

Even with that challenge, I still loved the job very much, because although I’m not very good with my hands, I’ve always been enjoying crafting. Customers are also very nice, I just hope they wouldn’t get shocked when they come home open the gift and find where I hid my mistakes

The two hour shift went so fast I couldn’t believe it. It was so busy we didn’t even have time to stop and looked at the watch. But it may also be because I enjoyed it too, because after that I went window shopping for a while, I felt like I was walking for ages but actually it was just 45 minutes. Something that I enjoyed even more than shopping, you can imagine how fun it was!

And there a thing I noticed that gifts for mums, wives, and women in general are mostly associated with kitchen products/cooking utensils. Isn’t that a way of saying “Hey, I bought you this, please cook good food for me”? Because at the end of the day, the one who bought them is also the one that enjoys the benefit of those products. Does it undermines the value of women? I don’t know. Maybe if I’m the woman of the family someday, I will like something that helps me to do the job more easily, too. But maybe I can buy them myself. Maybe I’ll like more a present that is put a lot of thoughts into, something that values me as a woman/wife/mother, not as a servant of the house.

Anyway, Happy Mother’s Day to all Mums in the world. I felt a bit aching when I was wrapping presents for someone else’s mum while I can’t even say Happy Mother’s Day to my mum in person.