Are we losing the art of gift wrapping?
Admiring the Christmas tree this year, one thing stood out. Instead of glittering wrapped boxes stacked on top of each other, all tilted on top of big ribbons, there was a line of paper bags. Many bags didn’t even have cards. Some were just in brown bags, with a name and who it was from, written directly onto the surface in a Pentel pen.
I remember a time when there were no paper bags at all. No matter the odd shape or size, each present was bundled in wrapping paper and adorned with a ribbon. As a child, Christmas Eve was spent reading thoughtfully written cards and tearing into well-wrapped presents late into the night.
They weren’t necessarily fancy or big gifts either—but there was an extra bit of care put into them, marked by the careful wrapping.
My mother and her sister were meticulous, if not a bit militant, about wrapping their Christmas gifts properly. They had special techniques, like trimming scrap paper to form and fold layers neatly applied to boxes. Whenever I would wrap, if the scotch tape showed, they would unwrap the gift and show me little tricks to fold the tape without being seen.
And now, while we still wrap gifts for each other, or those closest to us, we have discovered: We are, quite frankly, tired of wrapping each and every Christmas present.
Yes, it is physically exhausting. And with the excessive Christmas parties and obligations in between, it’s just so much easier to put a token in a bag. So do we care less? Or is our world just too crazy today that using paper bags is just so much more convenient?
Convenience versus care
Gift bags are not inherently careless. On the contrary, they are reusable, practical, and the more responsible choice. Every Christmas, we throw out all the torn and crumpled wrapping paper but keep the bags and ribbons to use the next year.
From pummeling through traffic to attending dinner after dinner, as well as the busyness of “wrapping” up work before the year ends, it can be easier to adopt a culture of last-minute shopping and grab-and-go gifting. But in this shift toward efficiency, there is a subtle emotional difference between a hand-wrapped gift and one simply handed over without wrapping. There is as much of a ritual to wrapping as unwrapping a gift that slows us down. One has to pause to cut, fold, and stick on the paper.
Removing that ritual takes away an intangible but meaningful aspect of showing a gift given with care.
In an article by Associated Press, Sandra Goldmark, associate dean at Columbia Climate School, reflected on receiving a gift that couldn’t go under the tree (for example, her husband organizing all her passwords for her): “It was not something easy to wrap and put under the tree, but believe me, it was meaningful and really helped me more than any additional object cluttering up my home could have.”
Care, time, and attention—those are exactly the things traditional gift wrapping once represented.
Sustainability complication
At the same time, gift wrapping has a real environmental cost. According to the Associated Press, landfills overflow with millions of pounds of wrapping paper during the Christmas season. Much of the paper, blended with plastic to make it shiny or sparkly, is unrecyclable.
Environmental experts point out that much of this impact is avoidable. Reusable fabric wraps, newspapers, brown paper, old maps, or twine are all alternatives. Sustainable living educator Sarah Robertson-Barnes even encourages creative options like making ingredients in bulk and packing them in Mason jars for cookie mix, spice mixes, or other practical ingredients. “It’s inexpensive, but it takes care and time and attention,” she said.
The challenge is balancing sustainability with sentiment. Thoughtful, eco-friendly wrapping can still capture the same care and attention that traditional gift wrapping once represented, without creating excess waste.
So are paper bags killing the art of gift wrapping?
Or are they simply responding to a world that’s more rushed, more environmentally conscious, and more practical?
In Nathalie Grace Adalid’s article, “Make it a green, eco-conscious Christmas,” she writes, “While the Yuletide season is a time for joy and celebration, it’s also when waste and excess often peak, not only in the Philippines but all over the world,” citing that every year, about 11.2 billion tons of solid waste are collected worldwide.
So maybe that’s the real tension here: sustainability versus sentiment and convenience versus care. Maybe the bigger issue isn’t whether paper bags are killing the art of gift wrapping, but what it means to show our effort with gift-giving, in a way that still makes sense for the world we live in now.
Maybe the answer is not to return to excess and waste but to still keep wrapping, a little more intentionally, by reusing materials creatively, thinking of unconventional gifts, and just saving the specially wrapped presents for those we are closest to.
Because who are we kidding? We’re not perfect, and sometimes it really is easier to just use a paper bag.
