The Christmas season brings many important, beautiful and even holy things to mind. One of those things is scotch tape. I’m not saying scotch tape is important, beautiful or holy; obviously it’s not. But I have to say that sometimes in my lesser holy moments, like late at night when I’m trying to wrap gifts and I can’t find the tape I bought last year and haven’t used since then,  that’s when scotch tape can suddenly seem like a bigger seasonal deal than it actually is.

Every year, I buy scotch tape. Every freaking year. I don’t buy it every year because we use it all up on all of our wrapping – I buy it every year because every freaking year we lose it. Those rolls of  magic tape manage to magically disappear.

Last night was one of those nights when we tried to wrap gifts and ran into the annual lack-of-tape issue. And you’d think we’d see it coming by now, because just as Christmas itself shouldn’t be a surprise, not having tape shouldn’t be a surprise either and so you’d think I’d just start buying tape every time I go to the store during the month of November, so that by the time I need to wrap in the 2nd or 3rd week of December I’ll have about 18 rolls of the stuff lying around. If I can find it.

Anyway, last night we needed tape and couldn’t find it. By the way, last night we learned that although packing tape used for shipping boxes is, in fact, transparent and seems related to normal scotch tape, it’s just not even close. Very bad for gift wrapping.

So this morning I went to the grocery store and got two rolls of scotch tape. When I got to the checkout area, the checkout guy said, “Man, we need to keep a lot more of this around because people are buying a lot of it.” And I told him my whole sad history of losing tape every year, and having to buy it even though I’m sure I have a thousand rolls of it at home already in some mysterious place. And then the guy behind me in line got into the conversation and started laughing – not at me, but with me so I didn’t mind – in a way that only guys in a bonding moment would understand. Because that’s what it was – a moment of male bonding between the checkout guy, the other guy in line and me, over a common guy problem – being the one who ALWAYS gets sent to the store to buy tape for the family in December, because no one can ever find it.

This morning’s tape bonding moment was a good thing, because I don’t do a lot of the more traditional guy bonding things. I don’t care about sports that much, meaning I couldn’t care less whether Kobe Bryant plays a full game again or how much they pay him not to play,  and I don’t care that much about craft beer. Not that I think less of guys who care about those things – I’m just not in it with them. But tape – now there’s something all men have suffered over.

So men, it’s time for transparency on the scotch tape issue. This is something we can all stick together on. OK, I don’t have any more tape puns. But I’ll tell what I do have –  two rolls of scotch tape right here in this very room as I’m typing this, and I’m not letting them out of my sight.