In keeping with my fascination for cubist ideas, I took a small flat box of long proportion and drew a line from one corner to its opposite corner. I then placed the box on the table of my scroll saw and cut the box in half. By rotating one of the halves and joining it to the other with two pieces of tape, applied to the pointiest ends, I had a box shaped like a christmas tree.
I wrapped the box with paper from a large marketing flyer that had lots of solid black areas. This kind of coated paper makes easy folds and creases. With care I slowly folded with gentle finger work and trimmed with occasional scissorwork. I taped the folds and had a nicely wrapped black tree.
Next I took one of those green-plastic web sleeves that they put on one’s wine bottles to keep them from hurting each other, and trimmed it to wrap around the box. Its dimensional grid added symbolic pine branches, and, coincidentally, matched the angles of my sliced box.
Since the plastic was not large enough to cover the whole wrap, I was left with a triangle of space at the bottom. I added a patch of red metallic shopping-bag paper.
I thought the tree needed a star. I cut it from gold ribbon and mounted it on a small piece of twist-tie using hot glue.
And I finished the wrap with initials made with my ancient supply of rub-off type.