Photo by the author, 2021 When I was 12 years old, my grandmother taught me how to make gum wrapper chains. It’s easy to do: you fold a candy wrapper into a rectangle with two flaps, fold it across the center, and thread another of the same through it. Do this enough times and you end up with a zigzag-shaped garland. I worked on it all the time, folding new sections from a bag of brightly colored wrappers saved for me by family and friends. By winter it was maybe 10 feet long, and we put it o...