EVERYWHERE, UNITED STATES – What should be a Christmas morning filled with celebration and cheer has turned to horror and bloodshed: life-threatening wrapping paper-related paper cuts have sent millions of Americans to emergency departments, completely overwhelming the health care system this morning.

No deaths have been reported, but at least 20 million are listed in critical condition.

“It appears that the anticipation for gifts has caused everyone to let down their guard: kids, great grandparents, and everyone in between,” explained Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Robert R. Redfield, who now reports a nationwide shortage of Band-Aids and gauze. “Americans are carelessly tearing and ripping into their gifts, and the result is the worst wrapping-paper crisis since the Great Depression.”

Emergency room personnel are seeing record-breaking cases of disfigured fingers, hands, arms, and faces, each laden with dozens even thousands of brutal paper cuts, some penetrating so deep as to lacerate brachial arteries and, in a dozen cases, the aorta. Surgeons and blood banks are desperately pleading those who haven’t been afflicted to donate blood as supplies are running dangerously low.

“Wrapping paper is not only taking out the gift recipient, it’s taking out others,” Redfield told Gomerblog, who has asked that all Christmas gifts in American households be quarantined or, at the very least, opened only after putting on the appropriate safety gear. “Once the wrapping paper is flung off the present, it is ricocheting off unsuspecting bystanders, causing secondary and tertiary trauma often worse than the ones suffered by the initial gift recipient.”

Elders with femur fractures sustained from slipping on stray wrapping paper number just shy of 2 million.

Unable to keep his composure any longer, Redfield has just issued a dire warning to Americans: “For the love of Pete, stay in your rooms and do not open any more gifts this Christmas!! Avoid that damn Christmas tree and everything underneath it!! Your life, the lives of others depend on it!!”

In additional and heartbreaking breaking news, Gomerblog reports one family in Philadelphia is trapped and possibly crushed under the weight of an over-sized red gift bow after trying to remove it from their brand-new Lexus.