By Dorothy Rosby
You can’t tell by looking at my wrapping, but I was once a professional gift wrapper. Sort of. When I was a teenager, I worked at a hardware store in my hometown, Buffalo, South Dakota. Buffalo had a population of around 350 people and was many miles from a department store.
Also it was before online shopping—about a hundred years before online shopping. So the hardware store carried a variety of housewares, toys and other items that were often purchased for gift giving. We also had a fabulous selection of wrapping paper and bows but only a few people on staff who could really do them justice. I wasn’t one of them.
Practice should make perfect and I wrapped many gifts, but they always had those big bulges on the sides of the package where the paper comes together—like I accidentally wrapped a hammer in there, which I may have done once or twice. Even today I turn a gift on its side and put a big bow on the lump to cover it up.
But I can finally feel good about my wrapping, and not because it’s gotten better. Recently I read about several studies suggesting attractive gift wrapping can backfire by leading the receiver to anticipate an equally attractive gift. That means when they open your beautifully wrapped package and find a boiled egg slicer or a hair removal device, they’re bound to be disappointed. I guess they might be anyway. But researchers say fancy wrapping can even dampen the enthusiasm of someone receiving a nice gift.
Meanwhile, mediocre wrapping can enhance the joy of receiving any gift because it doesn’t build up expectations—though I don’t think anything could enhance the joy of receiving a hair remover or an egg slicer.
It makes sense really. Imagine that a month before Christmas you receive a gift that’s been professionally wrapped in gold metallic wrapping paper with a red satin ribbon and a giant bow. You see it under your tree every day and you can’t help imagining all the wonderful things that could be in that package. A new laptop? A small drone? A couple of hundred-dollar bills and a rock to add weight to the package? You can’t wait for Christmas!
Finally, it’s time. You tear into the package prepared to be wowed, and you find…a bathroom scale. Naturally you’re disappointed.
If these studies had been done back when I was a professional gift wrapper it would have saved me a lot of embarrassment. I could have handed my customers their lumpy packages and said, “If your girlfriend is disappointed that you bought her mixing bowls for Christmas, don’t blame me.”
According to one researcher there’s an exception to the gift wrap rule, and that’s when the value of your gift isn’t obvious. For example, let’s say you’re giving your teenager the $1.3 million Diamond Crypto Smartphone. If she thinks the diamonds are cubic zirconia she might carelessly misplace her phone under her bed or accidentally throw it in with the dirty laundry. In order to signal that the gift is valuable, you should definitely have it professionally wrapped. You should also definitely have your head examined.
For gifts valued at less than $1.3 million dollars, consider more humble wrapping. You could wrap your gift in newspaper—being careful to avoid the obituary page. Or wrap it in brown paper and tie it up with string while humming a verse of “My Favorite Things.” You could even make the wrapping part of the gift. For example, use a tea towel to wrap a package of kitchen sponges.
But my personal favorite is the gift bag. Gift bags are attractive but not so much that they raise my expectations when I receive one. They don’t require any special wrapping skill when I reuse them later. And they make it easy for me to peek.
Dorothy Rosby is a blogger and humor columnist whose column appears regularly in publications throughout the West and Midwest. She’s the author of four books of humorous essays all available locally at Mitzi’s Books in Rapid City and on Amazon.