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Christmas Wrapping

"Christmas Wrapping"
Single Waitresses-Christmas Wrapping cover.jpg
Front cover of picture sleeve of 1982 UK reissue
Single by The Waitresses
from the album A Christmas Record
B-side "Christmas Fever" (Charlelie Couture)
"Hangover 1/1/83" (The Waitresses)
Released 1981
Format 7-inch, 12-inch
Recorded 1981
Genre Christmas, new wave, post-punk
Length 4:30 (single edit)
5:18 (LP edit)
Label Ze WIP 6763 (1981)
Ze WIP 6821 (1982)
Writer(s) Chris Butler
Producer(s) Chris Butler
The Waitresses chronology
"I Know What Boys Like"
(1980)
"Christmas Wrapping"
(1981)
"I Know What Boys Like" (reissue)
(1982)

"Christmas Wrapping" is a Christmas song by the American new wave band The Waitresses. It was first released on the compilation album A Christmas Record (1981) on ZE Records, and also appears on the Waitresses' 1982 EP I Could Rule the World if I Could only Get the Parts (1982). It has been included on numerous Christmas holiday compilation albums in the US and UK, including Now That's What I Call Christmas!: The Signature Collection (2003). The song received positive reviews from music critics, and AllMusic described it as "one of the best holiday pop tunes ever recorded."

The song is told from the perspective of a busy single woman adamant not to participate in the exhausting Christmas period. She has "turned down all [her] invites" and resolves to "miss this one this year". Earlier in the year, she met an appealing man in a ski shop and got his telephone number, but had no time to ask him out. Despite the pair's attempts to meet in the following months, a succession of mishaps keeps them apart. Finally, on Christmas Eve, as the lady is roasting the "world's smallest turkey" (courtesy of A&P) for her solo holiday feast, she realizes she has forgotten to buy cranberries. She runs to a convenience store and, by coincidence, runs into the gentleman (who has also forgotten cranberries), bringing her Christmas "to a very happy ending". In the final refrain, she admits that she "couldn't miss this one this year".

In 1981 ZE Records asked each of its artists to record a Christmas song for a Christmas compilation album, A Christmas Record. Songwriter Chris Butler wrote the song in August that year, assembling it from assorted unused riffs he had saved "for a rainy day". Some of the lyrics were finished in a taxi cab on the way to the recording studio. Butler explained the lyrics came from "just very much that for years I hated Christmas ... Everybody I knew in New York was running around like a bunch of fiends. It wasn't about joy. It was something to cope with."


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