The gift wrap competition started out the same way I imagine most Christmas traditions do: a little too much nog, a hypothetical suggestion, someone takes things a little too seriously. Ten years later we’ve got performance art, spring-loaded gift delivery mechanisms, gifts baked into fruitcakes, an electric nun.

When I first mention the competition, most people think it’s about bows, handmade wrapping paper, maybe some calligraphy or a flower arrangement. I suppose that’s how it started out, but even the first year there was a suspicion that the whole thing was about to take a turn for the warped. My cousin, notorious for her fiendishly tight ribbons, wove a seamless gift wrap out of wide ribbons. Someone stuffed a pair of pajamas in a beer bottle and dared the recipient to get them out without breaking it. And also there was a moose.

The next time around, my aunt brought a three-foot-tall, gold-wrapped model of the Taj Mahal made out of a birdfeeder. We’d been owned, and the next year it was on—hardcore. There was a gingerbread house with the gift inside. We had a boom box accompanied by an original composition, to be sung by the recipient as she opened the gift. My dad built a two-foot-diameter styrofoam Oreo, accurate to the number of ridges on the edge, then built another one when the black spray paint melted it all. My brother-in-law, then a civil engineering grad student, outsourced his R&D to undergrads, who developed a spring-loaded mechanism that ejected a stack of CDs directly into my crotch.

Merely wrapping gifts was no longer challenging, so we began restricting entries to themes. The “Broadway” theme brought out a playbill for Nunsense with a wind-up nun that shot sparks out of her mouth, a Wicked mannequin head pilfered from a shady hat store in Toronto and colored green with Hi-Liter. It also brought out a subway car on New York City’s N&R Broadway line, a seedy Broadway strip club and a meat counter from the Broadway Market, complete with a rubber chicken and simulated pickled pork guts. The “Pantry” theme inspired several pan-trees, a pant-tree and a pain-tree (with French breadsticks, get it?).

Last year, we adopted Iron Chef rules: two-hour time limit, all raw materials provided, on the theme of “Fun & Games.” The entries were a little less polished, but no less insane: the set of Wheel of Fortune with clothespeg contestants; “Whack-A-Mime”; and an amusement park with a house of mirrors, Daredevil Drop and a functional ferris wheel.

My sister just emailed me to tell me this year’s theme is Mythology. Fiendish.

You’ve still got time if you want to try this with your family. Start by arranging a standard Secret Santa, where everyone pulls a name from a hat and only buys for that person. Make sure nobody pulls their own name; we also make sure you don’t have the same person two years in a row. Thanksgiving is an opportune time to distribute everyone’s wish list to the participants and announce the theme, if there is one. You can decide on a theme by consensus, but that’s for wusses—ours is decreed by the previous year’s winner. If everyone has to use the same materials, use the next couple of weeks to assemble craft supplies like egg cartons, wine corks, pom-poms and other bric-a-brac. When the day comes, get together, nog yourselves up and have the viewing, opening and judging. Every participant submits a secret ballot with their favorite three, awarding them one, two or three points. The one with the most points tallied wins the right to be insufferable about it for the whole next year.

David Kleinschmidt was last seen going to the workshop with an arc welder and several cans of spray paint. He cannot be reached at webmaster@artvoice.com until after Christmas.