Crepe Paper

Following a class at the gym recently, my dear friend Gentle Noreen shared that during the cool down, as she raised her arms, the sight of crepe skin alarmed her. I recalled a post of 2022, dug it out, and decided it was worth another look. Enjoy! Happy Thanksgiving!

The crepe paper streamers mirroring the colors of Midwest autumn were draped and twisted throughout the church’s overflow room, delineating booths for the annual Church Bazaar and Turkey dinner. This was the 50s when our at-home birthday party decorations consisted of a colorful plastic table cloth and mini-wax candles held in place in flower-shaped candle holders on a homemade cake. Streamers were a level of ornamentation unfamiliar to me.

Watching the high school youth group take charge of the decorating deepened my intrigue. My five-year-old self aspired to be among those confident pre-adults one day, preparing the room to market crocheted hats, ornaments crafted from egg cartons, and jaw clenching divinity candy. In addition, those same adolescent designers had the privilege of checking coats and selling tickets on the night of the event, all of which looked more enthralling than the women’s work in the kitchen scrubbing cook pots. (I would eventually learn that one had to work through junior high carrying dinner trays and scraping plates before attaining the post of Holy Hanger of Crepe Paper.)

For me, crepe paper was the gold standard of decorating, just short of helium-filled balloons. My now legendary requests for a balloon “that stick in the air” were often rewarded with an orb attached to a yard-long wooden stick. In the ensuing years, that stick was replaced with a striped plastic dowel no stronger than a straw. It would be years before I learned the magic word ‘helium.’

There have been many opportunities to use crepe paper in all its forms over the years. Mike and I fashioned our first Christmas tree from large sheets of green taped to the wall of our dismal university apartment. We adorned the flimsy paper with paint-by-number wooden ornaments that my Aunt Jean gifted me for my birthday. Those ornaments are among our most precious today. The tree went into the trash on New Year’s.

The streamers of crepe paper are the most exhilarating, purchased in colorful rolls then draped across rooms from lights to ceiling to doorways, connecting balloons (not helium-filled but taped to the door frame) and highlighting good wishes printed out in large block letters. How fun it is to stretch out those wrinkles, the dye staining our hands as we experiment with the optimal combination of length and twists. When the party ends, the decorations go into the landfill rather than the closet. Not ecologically friendly. But in years past we were blessedly ignorant.

My thoughts turned to crepe paper the other day as I stretched to relieve tension in my shoulders while reading. There it was: crepe-paper skin on my arms!!! Yes, three exclamation points!!! Repositioning my arm allowed gravity to smooth offending sight by dragging down the excess tissue. Not an attractive nor permanent remedy. This isn’t just dry skin. This is old lady crepe skin.

Why am I surprised? Signs of aging has been sneaking up on me for years. There are the thankfully few gray hairs in my thinned mane. Enlarged blood vessels course through blotches on my hands, a map of the Mekong River Delta. The crevices in my cheeks and around my mouth and eyes would need putty to smooth out. My blemish free dermatology PA calls wart-like growths “birthday spots”. And of course, the neck, the first sign of aging in women in which only someone like Nora Ephron can find humor. I won’t list the invisible symptoms. Well, I would, but I fear I would leave something out, causing offense to an organ that has henceforth been rather cooperative.

There is only one way to cope: laugh. On a drive to Michigan recently, my friend Diane and I compared our crepe skin, hand splotches, large veins, and birthday spots. Somehow it doesn’t feel so bad, knowing we are all in this together.