It's a wrap

Photo by Olga Safronova on Unsplash

A pretty sound ecological case can be made against gift-wrapping: to cover something in paper and festoon it with a bow is wasteful, pointless and short. After all, the wrapping will be torn off within minutes of the gift arriving in the hands of its intended recipient. What is the point of it all?

That is the point.

As John Gapper mused in the Financial Times, “Wrapping and the various traditions surrounding seasonal gift-giving transform the objects under Christmas trees from profane to sacred. Without that, as one anthropologist wrote, ‘The heap of loot is too obviously a pile of commodities rather than gifts’.”

That’s an intriguing thought. That a bit of sparkly paper and ribbon can have a transformative effect, rendering that book, diary, pen with gizmos into a gift.

The FT piece quotes a study by the late sociologist Theodore Caplow of Christmas rituals in middle America. Of the 366 family celebrations from 1979 that he examined in Muncie, Indiana,…