Why we wrap presents?

Tis the holiday season and so we are all covered up in wrapping paper. It seems no gift today comes without a colorful wrap around it. But where did this strange custom emanate from?

There is something quite trivial about wrapping paper. But we spend almost $2.6 billion annually on it ,as per one estimate. As much as half of the 85 million tons of paper products Americans consume each year, apparently, goes toward packaging, wrapping, and decorating objects. Wrapping paper and shopping bags on their own account for about 4 million tons of the trash created annually in the U.S. In Britain, per one estimate, people throw away 226,800 miles of wrapping paper over the holidays alone -- enough to stretch nine times around the world!

So wrapping paper is expensive. Wrapping paper is wasteful. Wrapping paper is, technically, impractical. That said, however, wrapping paper is also pretty awesome: It's pretty, it's arty, and it's one way, among others, to make even the most impersonal offerings -- gift cards, electronics, even (eeeek) cash -- seem meaningful. For better or for worse, there's just something about a big, red bow that captures your heart.

But where did the wrapping tradition come from? Why do we, each time we give a gift, ritually wrap that offering in decorative tree pulp? 

The short answer is that wrapping, as a practice, has been around for ages -- literally, ages. The Japanese furoshiki, the reusable wrapping cloth still in use today, is a pretty faithful rendition of the version that's been around since the Edo period. The Korean bojagi dates from the Three Kingdoms Period, possibly as early as the first century A.D. In the west, using paper as a covering for gifts has been a longstanding, if largely luxury-oriented, practice: Upper-class Victorians regularly used elaborately decorated paper -- along with ribbons and lace -- to conceal gifts. In the early 20th century, thick, unwieldy paper gave way to tissue (often colored in red, green, and white) that would similarly work to conceal offerings until they were opened. The practice was echoed in a slightly more practical form by stores, which would wrap customers' purchases in sturdy manila papers. (A note, printed in Hardware Dealers' Magazine in 1911, hints at the core pragmatism of this practice: "Whatever your business," it advises, "leave the freak wrapping papers to the other fellow and you will make friends for your store by this means.")

In 1917, however, in the United States, all that -- the tissue paper, the luxury paper, the "freak" paper -- changed. Decorative paper became democratized. According to Mental Floss, which knows of such things, that happened for the same reason so many innovations come about: by accident. The story goes thus: 

Two brothers ran a stationary store in Kansa. One year they ran into a problem during the 1917 holiday season: Business had been too good at their Kansas City, Mo., shop, and they’d run out of the white, red, and green tissue papers that were the era’s standard gift dressing. Poking around the shop, Rollie realized they still had a stack of fancy French paper meant for lining envelopes. On a lark, he placed the lining paper in a showcase and priced it at 10 cents a sheet. The paper sold out instantly. The next year, the Hall brothers pressed their luck, offering the fancy paper again during the holiday season. Again, it flew off shelves. By 1919, the brothers decided to print their own special paper for concealing presents, and the gift wrap business was born. Today, wrapping paper is a $3.2 billion industry, and you can buy it by the roll at any store. 

The brothers? Joyce and Rollie Hall. Their store? Hallmark. The industry ? Wrapping for gifts. The annual take over $ 2 billion!

Of course there will likely come a day, sometime in the not-too-distant future, when we will look back on wrapping paper with the kind of retrospective condescension we reserve for the most naive elements of our history. Wasting precious paper -- killing trees -- for decoration! Spending money on a total frivolity! How ridiculous people were back then!