“I call this game fun in a box,” said the Cat.

It’s often said that when you give a child a toy, they may spend more time playing with the box it came in than with the toy itself. This goes double if there is a paper-engineer in the family and when our kids were little, large cardboard boxes were seldom discarded — they were put aside for the next birthday party when they would be cut and folded into …

… a pirate ship … 

… a dinosaur … 

… a dragon …  

 

… or a castle gateway. 

In our family, a party is not a party without some creative use of cardboard. 

Perhaps that explains why my son Max — presumably thinking that being six foot three at the age of fifteen did not make him conspicuous enough — decided to attend his school prom dressed in a cardboard top hat and tails.

So while other students were fussing with their dinner jackets and ball gowns, I was helping Max package himself in corrugated cardboard and parcel tape. Here is the wondrous result.