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Since early life crawled out of the sludge and decided it would like to continue crawling, prising shiny shells open to get to their inner goodness (fruit/seeds/viscera) has been an unbreakable habit for the living – we can’t help it. We love opening things; banana peels, packets of biscuits, envelopes that look like they don’t have bills in them. And so comes Christmas with shiny boxes to be opened, full of promised goodness for our continuing survival; in many cases, instead of life-giving nutrients, it’s regifted candles from the neighbours. But even now, away from the primordial grime, the message of “this looks good, it might contain good things if I open it” whirrs away in our lizard brains.
Psychologically, so the theory goes, the shine of the shell matters. Candle regift hastily handed over in an old plastic bag? It sucks. But if the candle comes to you in shiny wrapping, with ribbons, and a handwritten glittery card … those neighbours; they tried, they care. It’s worth something. Even if it’s the same candle you gave them last year.
Yet fewer people are interested in buying wrapping paper and cards for the gifts they give at Christmas. A study from the retail analysts Mintel shows that the Shiny Shell of Worth idea isn’t holding up with 25- to 34-year-olds in particular – only 49% still send cards, with one in three believing social media to be just dandy for forwarding their Christmas wishes. Half of us in the UK would also choose to get our presents with no wrapping at all. Who needs a stamp for a card when you can text over two snowmen emoji and a Christmas tree, an additional snowflake if you fancy, an accompanying message with correct spelling, maybe. And a lot of us are happy with that, Sky Ocean Rescue finding that 46% would rather receive a digital greeting than a paper card.
Things are changing, partly due to green gifting concerns. No to unrecyclable glitter cards and paper the council will leave behind, so less waste. Perhaps there’s also a move away from the superficiality that can come with Christmas, a feeling that the love you have for your giftee just isn’t possible to sum up with three-for-two rolls of mass-produced reindeer paper.
But the more crotchety among us might call it laziness or a lack of care instead. Maybe millennials just don’t want to put in the effort previous generations did, and prefer to send their texts and unwrapped Amazon parcels because it’s easy and instant. Maybe it’s a symptom of 25- to 34-year-olds not understanding the value of giving; that Christmas, a time that used to be about goodwill etc, doesn’t mean that much any more.
And maybe one of the other findings from the research – that 55% of those surveyed don’t like to bother with the hassle of going shopping for gifts in store – would back that up. But if you can remember growing up in a home stocked with cheap multipack boxes of generic Christmas cards for tit-for-tat posting, the growing preference for text messaging and online shopping doesn’t seem so lazy or meaningless in comparison.
What’s more pointless and fake than a cardboard “Happy Christmas” delivered through a door just because the other person did it first?
Or those awful annual missives smug families send to detail their successes over the last year – nobody really likes receiving those, because they’re terrible. Especially if there’s a picture of them wearing Santa hats on the front, especially if the card’s co-signed by the family pet. It’s not possible to create something that twee and asinine in a text or tweet format – and isn’t that something to be thankful for?
The Mintel study also showed that as sales of those old multipacks of cards are going down, more is being spent on individual cards – those chosen with a specific recipient in mind and picked with genuine care. As senior retail analyst Samantha Dover said of the results: “In a digital world where the tangible is vanishing, consumers are increasingly elevating the value of physical goods and the emotional attachment to sending and receiving.”
If you wrap it nicely, it’s because the person it’s for is worth it. And if you haven’t wrapped it, it’s the giving that’s meaningful. So, just as it’s always been, then: a shiny shell is just that, it’s what’s at its core that’s nourishing and good.
• Phoebe-Jane Boyd is an online media company content editor
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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Are the days of Christmas wrapping paper and cards over?https://goo.gl/8KbWuo
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