7. All Wrapped Up

When we present a gift, our culture, despite its preference for low decorum and informality, nevertheless pressures us first to wrap up the object. We are so accustomed to conforming to this rule that we rarely wonder at its meaning or purpose. People in other cultures may feel no need to wrap gifts at all.

The Melanesian kula gift, haunted by power and fame, was, as we have seen, flung unwrapped and unadorned at the feet of its new owner. Maori gifts, if not too bulky, were placed at the feet of the one to whom they were offered, with a gruff expression that meant something like "This is for you." Dress cloaks—important gifts—were laid on the ground, outspread like the receiver's shadow, with the collar end farthest from and facing him; weapons as gift offerings were displayed with the haft towards his hand.¹ Care was thus taken in presenting gifts, but wrapping was not part of it. The response from the recipient was often a perfunctory one, the aim being not to show any pleasure, indeed any emotion, at all—which does not mean that there was no real appreciation of the gift. Remaining impassive was etiquette.

For us, on the other hand, a gift ought normally to be wrapped. We call it a "present" because it is presented; but also it is present in its wrapping-costume during its time "on stage," during the small drama of gifting. A gift, especially one put to use or on display, goes on to "represent" the giver, reminding the receiver of who gave it. Special objects brought and presented as gifts used to be enclosed in chests, cases, or bags, or sewn into cloth coverings for protection during transport. The word's origin recalls the cloth coverings: wrap comes from the Greek for "to sew."²

Today, we use paper to cover our gifts, and it is not primarily because they are in need of protection that we wrap them. If we mail a gift, we first carefully wrap it in special "gift" paper—the prettier, the better—and then enclose it, as a safeguard during the journey, in something sturdy and commonplace like brown paper or a plain envelope. Gift wrappings are folded with care. The string that binds a mere parcel becomes, for a gift, a ribbon, often with bows and rosettes added—anything to replace with embellishment the toughness of workaday knots. Extra trouble is taken because of the need to declare that, whatever it is, the thing thus enclosed is not a commodity.

A gift nowadays has almost invariably been bought. As such, it is certainly a commodity, but one that is summoned now to become something else. The wrapping is a sign that the object has changed into a gift. When, on increasingly rare occasions, we give something we ourselves have made—edible gifts mostly, such as jams and chutneys and cakes—we often feel little compulsion to wrap them. We occasionally enfold but fail to hide them, by covering them in something revealing such as cellophane. Not hiding by wrapping means that this present was not bought in a shop. It was made to be given away, not to make money; it does not need, therefore, to be converted into a gift.

We do work at shopping, however, quite apart from having first saved the money to buy gifts. As Christmas draws closer, we spend time fighting our way daily through the shopping crowds, returning from each expedition exhausted, with arms weighed down and aching feet. And we complain. Christmas has gotten out of hand, we say. It has become too commercialized. We are all so greedy, so demanding, and so exigent nowadays. It really is too much. These objections may be true, but our struggles and complaints mean in part that the gifts we have bought have manifestly cost us trouble. We may not actually have made them, but everyone is aware—our own grumbling making sure it is understood—that work, freely undertaken, went into their acquisition.

If we give a very large present, one too big to wrap up—a car, a piano—we still feel constrained to make a gesture towards wrapping it, or rather designating it as a gift: despite the obvious generosity of the offering, we nevertheless decorate it in some way, write a pretty card and attach it, or—more extravagantly—present it in a particular mise en scène. Always, of course, we remove the price from a gift: presents, unlike commodities, are price-less. But we attach cards with names and brief messages that are meant to be carefully read before (though sometimes after) the gift is opened. This practice assures the person that this present was meant for him or her alone, and usually it is important that givers make themselves known: a gift describes a relationship between a giver and a receiver.

The wrapping paper—merely decorative, gratuitous, not at all "useful" except for its meaning—is material proof of the trouble taken. Care for the present within symbolizes the giver's caring about the recipient. The gift inside should itself, if at all possible, prove this caring: in the case of a personal gift (as opposed to objects handed out to clients or to their personnel by a commercial company), it will have been chosen with the specific receiver in mind, taking into account her tastes or needs as they arise from preferences and pursuits, and even demonstrating "insider" knowledge about what she possesses already, what (therefore) she lacks, and even what she would like even if the very nature of the object lies, until now, outside her experience.

Sometimes, however, gift-givers feel constrained to ask people what they would like to receive. People in our society have so much already; often we do not know others well enough to be able to gauge their taste or know what they have not acquired. Whether we are too lazy to find out, or have too little time to discover an object that nobody can reasonably be expected to possess before being given one, or whether we are too anxious to guess and possibly be mistaken, we forgo, by asking what somebody wants, two important elements of modern Western gift-giving: the receiver's surprise, and the giver's own decision-making. But even when the recipient knows what we have bought, we still feel we should wrap it up before presenting it. Two rules of gift-giving having been broken, the wrapping replaces a little of the aura of what should have been a surprise and a declaration of our estimation of the gift's receiver.

The personalizing of gifts is very specific to our culture. In other societies there may be rigid rules about what is to be given. These can depend upon complex questions of rank, on the occasion on which the gift is given, on the cost that is considered appropriate. It may be perfectly mannerly to display the price of a gift on the package.³ The gifts themselves might be prescribed, as when a Japanese engagement to be married has been settled and presents must be made of tea in a magnificently decorated box, sake, and a sea bream.⁴

In Japan, the wrapping paper for presents given on auspicious occasions is decorated with an emblem called a noshi, a hexagonal tube of paper containing a piece of abalone shell, or a printed picture of this ancient symbol of purity. The wrappings for gifts of condolence, on the other hand, should be printed with motifs such as lotus flowers. There are many significant ways of folding the paper, often layer upon layer of it for the addition of refinement. String comes in eight different combinations of colours, and there are various ways of tying it, each with a meaning or a level of formality.

Wrapping in Japan goes much further than merely covering gifts. Often the wrapping—which proclaims what the gift "says"—is more significant than the gift itself. Where the receiver knows what should be inside the parcel, the actual opening—the revelation—is not the point. Westerners who attempt to understand Japanese culture make the mistake of trying to "get through" the wrapping to "the essentials," which to us lie concealed inside. This is cultural bias at work: a hunt for "the hidden truth" is a typically Western obsession, ranging from the Freudian slip to our apparently endless fascination with whodunit novels. This disposition can cause us to miss the point (although we surely admire its beauty) of the Japanese wrapping itself, in which so much structure and meaning reside. One traditional Japanese covering for a gift is a furoshiki: a cloth so pretty, and so thoughtfully chosen, that it is itself a gift. The "outside" can be as important as—or even more important than—the "inside."

Indeed, the entire culture of Japan has been analyzed in terms of wrappings. Its system of honorifics in speech has been described as "a kind of armour" for the purposes of protection and distancing; women are wrapped in several layers of gorgeous silk, then tied with an extravagant cummerbund like "human parcels"; houses and gardens are designed with depth and layering in mind. Even sections of time are "wrapped" in elaborate, formal beginnings and endings. Where gifts are not purely formal and prescribed, Japanese wrappings are permitted to conceal surprising contents. The polite behaviour of givers and receivers then provides "wrapping" and cushioning. Wrapping can be thought of as a "cultural template," an organizing principle of the whole of Japanese culture.⁵

But such formal predictability can also be manipulated. The anthropologist Harumi Befu tells us how Japanese wrappings can force other people's behaviour because total reliance upon the mysterious force of reciprocity is taken for granted: a gift demands a return and will not take no for an answer. In Japan, one never opens a present until the donor has left. One must not in the presence of the giver show too much interest even in an unexpected gift. Etiquette demands as well that the giver must always play down his gift. "It's only a small thing," he says, and the receiver, knowing that this protestation is entirely conventional, bows and sets the carefully wrapped gift aside. He can have no idea of its actual value, and propriety forbids him to find out before the giver has departed. If later an inordinately expensive present should emerge from the wrappings, the recipient will know that an equivalent favour must now be forthcoming: the present demands a response. The only question is what exactly is being pressured to happen.⁶

When it is a culturally enforced rule that the donor should leave before a gift is opened, it is clear that witnessing a personal reaction is not the point of the transaction. It might be considered crude to display emotions in public, in which case polite givers withdraw to allow the opening of the present to occur in private.⁷ There would, however, be an emotional reaction (carefully dissimulated by the polite) should a gift not be given when it ought to be, or fail to be what obligation requires. An obligation to give, and the rules governing what a gift should be in precisely these circumstances, might be strict enough to preclude entirely both surprise and gratitude.

Gifts can be given on almost any occasion, of course. But many of them, in all cultures, arrive on special days, examples in our own society including birthdays, graduation days, partings, or retirement from a job. Such occasions are initiations, arrivals at definite stages in one's life journey, which others acknowledge and celebrate by giving gifts. Other presents are given and received by all who participate on seasonal, culturally agreed gift-giving days such as Christmas.

Like other gifts, Christmas presents must be wrapped. These paper coverings, easy to cut and fold, are specially manufactured for the season. They may be shiny, in order to reflect the candlelit ambience of a Christmas celebration, and to remind us of glittering snow and ice (even if we live where it never snows or freezes). Or the paper is green, red, or both—the colours of Christmas worn by the tree and Santa Claus.⁸ The paper may have small Christmas symbols printed on it, and we might add stickers and other attachments bearing symbols—holly or bells, puddings or carollers, or even small pictures of wrapped presents, which are themselves conventional signs, like the other typical references to "the season."

In North America, mounds of gleaming wrapped gifts are commonly photographed without people present, before the ceremony of opening the presents begins.⁹ The amount of them and the beauty of the ensemble represent an achievement of sorts; it expresses both the family's material success and the size of the group of family members and their friends. As the mound is made up of separate presents, so we as a group of individuals constitute the family. The word individuals means "not-divided"; individuals are self-sufficient "wholes" that are (therefore) separate, just as each personal, message-bearing gift is separate in its package. When we want to say something is finished and complete, we call it "all wrapped up"; we "wrap up" a meeting, for instance.

All Christmas gifts must be wrapped because, since everyone gives together, no one should know what anybody else is giving. Surprise for us is an important part of the gift-giving effect. But it is also one of the cardinal rules of Western gift-giving that when you give a gift in return, then, as will be explained later, you must give back something different from what you received. This stipulation is easy to observe when presents are one on one: you give; I receive, open, and see what the gift is; and then, when I give back, I can be sure not to give you what you gave me. This knowledge, however, is usually unavailable on occasions when all give together. But since the contents of gift packages, thanks to their wrappings, are unknown to all save their givers, if two people give each other the same thing, it is clear that a mistake has been made; the rule has not been deliberately broken. We can even laugh about it, and note what similar tastes we have and what similar perceptions of each other. For the choice of a gift supplies information about what giver thinks of receiver.

When people open their Christmas presents, they are often individually photographed doing so.¹⁰ Hiding gifts by means of wrapping controls the drama of opening presents, and its timing. Wrapping makes a gift inscrutable before its contents are "dis-covered." The wrapping hides the gift in part to produce surprise—the dramatic moment that cameras are brought out to catch. For in our culture the response of the receiver rewards the giver, to the extent that giving a surprised and delighted response might have to be enacted even if it should not be felt.¹¹ Genuine surprise is a catalyst of emotion—here normally intended to be pleasure. And gratitude. One of the purposes of gift-wrapping personal presents is to provoke a sentiment of gratitude. When the gift in its wrapping is handed over, the receiver says "Thank you." This gratitude cannot be for the object, since the receiver does not yet know what it is. Thanks is for the giving—for the kindness in itself, apart from the actual thing given. It is for the trouble freely taken, and for the thought, which is what "counts." The wrapping having been torn open and flung aside, there will be a second "Thank you," together with exclamations and perhaps compliments of the creative kind, or congratulations to the giver on his or her insight into the receiver's preferences. Wrappings make receivers say "thank you" twice.

Christmas is a festival, and as such it must end. Feasts are by definition not ordinary time. To go on and on feasting would turn a festival into its opposite, which is normality. Great care is accordingly taken not to let this happen, because it would destroy the possibility of holding other feasts, on other occasions. The wrapping on the presents expresses both the "up" time that is festivity, and the closure of the festival, when we clear away the torn coloured paper, now unwanted débris,¹² and get ready to begin living ordinary time again. Another custom at Christmas is decorating the room containing the tree, where presents are given out. A further ritual, corresponding to the wanton destruction and sweeping away of gift wrappings, is taking down the decorations and throwing out the tree. The meaning is the same: Christmas is over. Celebrating it next year depends upon our decisively ending it now.