That's a Wrap

Can I tell you something?

I’m generous by nature and enjoy giving gifts. I enjoy doing so when it’s Christmas, someone’s birthday, anniversary, or graduation, or because it’s Tuesday. But I despise wrapping them. My wife can wrap packages with the perfect paper so expertly – festooned with ribbons and bows, leaves, tiny pinecones, and whatnot – that you can barely make out any seams and they take at least ten minutes to open. That is if you can make yourself open them at all because they’re so heartbreakingly beautiful. Whereas mine are wrapped with all the care and artistic flair of a pre-schooler finger painting for the first time.

It's not like I’m the only male of our species who’s a total failure wrapping presents, but I do feel blessed with a gift for making gifts look god awful.

No matter how carefully I apply my above-average math and geometry skills, I always cut either too much paper – this makes the ends look like the bulging slopes of Mt. St. Helens just before it blew – or not quite enough which requires a hasty patch job to conceal the present. Either way, my only option is to use an excessive amount of scotch tape which is haphazardly applied and mostly ineffective in masking the disaster. And as bad as I am with the paper, I’m even worse with ribbons, which is why I always buy the little bows with peel-off stickers on the back so I can just slap that sucker on and begin my next pre-school art project.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

Gift giving is an ancient Christian tradition associated with the Christmas feast and symbolic of the Magi – aka the three wise men – presenting gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to the new king.

Chances are good Jesus later regifted the myrrh to one of the Apostles for a birthday, but I’m sure at the time he acted thrilled to get tree sap.

For hundreds of years this practice was interpreted by Christian rulers to mean that the subjects should lavish their superiors with gifts – these were usually things of real value as opposed to myrrh – and that tradition is carried on to this day by televangelists.

During the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s when much of Europe was giving the Pope the finger, offering the church leader gifts fell out of favor in favor of giving children the presents. In part I assume because you could please the kids for a lot less money, but also the grip of theocracy on the masses was weakening and people were less afraid of losing their heads if they got the prelate a tacky tie. By the 1800s the custom had spread to the United States where parents started showering their children with cool stuff from Best Buy on Saint Nicholas Day, December 6^th, and New Year’s Eve.

But due to the popularity of The Night Before Christmas poem penned in 1823, and Charles Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol published in 1843, Christmas Eve became the traditional time to present gifts. Gradually, over the next few decades, moms and dads realized they’d rather drink egg nog and play Santa Comes Down the Chimney, so children were forced to spend a sleepless night terrorized by dancing sugar plums and wait for the dawn of Christmas Day to tear open the packages.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you either.

Shockingly, the tradition of gift giving at Christmas was heartily embraced by retailers and the entire month of December became a bonanza of sales and profits. By way of example, up until this century, the Christmas shopping season accounted for no less than 80% of the toy industry’s annual sales. Now, the shopping season starts Thanksgiving evening on ‘Black Friday’ and Americans spend about $4 billion a day every day until Santa says stop, which averages out to over $1,000 for every man, woman, and child.

A 1998 study on gift giving by University of Nevada researchers – this is one more reason to question the value of higher education and judgment of university administrators – revealed two very interesting findings.

The first is that there is a difference in perceived value between the gift giver and recipient which ranges from 10% to 33%, and they labeled this as the ‘deadweight loss of Christmas’. During my childhood the deadweight loss felt closer to 90%, but since I married Lori, it has hovered near zero. Except for that one sweater.

The second finding, which I find even more interesting, is the researchers discovered that gifts wrapped beautifully created higher expectations which led to greater disappointment. I must’ve known that intuitively and was thrilled to have confirmation my technique was the perfect gift-giving expression of under promising and over delivering. Plus, there’s an added bonus of the complete absence of guilt when you rip apart something that isn’t museum-quality work.

But what I really wanted to tell you is this.

Merry Christmas all. Thank you so much for reading my poorly wrapped essays and stories. The Laughable Feast will be taking next week off but return bright and early in 2025.

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.

BTW – go back and look at the photo. It’s not AI, it’s Lori’s work.