That’s a wrap
We have much to thank the Victorians for, not least the tradition of encasing Christmas presents in brightly coloured paper and ribbons, discovers
Matthew Dennison unravels the story of the wrapping paper we use every year
AMONG the more esoteric interests of the Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone was the cultural significance of paper in Japan. Gladstone’s curiosity was spurred by a report on Lord Elgin’s visits to the country in the late 1850s, which inventoried the ubiquity of paper in Japanese life: ‘It constituted the walls of our rooms and the fans that were in universal vogue—it was the wrapping of every purchase and furnished the string [with] which it [was] tied.’
Significantly, however, in 19th-century Japan, the paper that was used to bind shop purchases was discarded in the case of presents. Japanese presents were instead wrapped in folded and pleated reusable cloth, a technique of medieval origin called furoshiki, which remains a feature of Japanese present-giving today.
Whether or not this puzzled Gladstone has passed unrecorded. Among myriad developments of Victorian Britain was the increasing elaboration of the nation’s Christmas celebrations. If they were wrapped at all, Christmas presents under the Gladstones’ tree, like those of Britons everywhere, hid within layers not of fabric, but of paper.
Unpacking the history of throwaway decorative papers in Britain is complicated by the fragility of the material itself and our attitude towards it, but the practice of wrapping presents in brightly coloured papers is usually agreed to have been well under way by the 18th century.
For a long time, the English gift-givers’ preference was for marbled papers, such as those used in bookbinding, especially after the publication, in 1853, of C. W. Woolnough’s The Art of Marbling. This did much to demystify the paper-marbling process and new methods of production facilitated manufacture on a larger scale and more cheaply.
Marbled papers had the advantage that no two designs were ever wholly alike and, in the period before Christmas decorations became so exclusively associated with shades of red and green, they were available in a wide range of colours and colour combinations. Before the advent of adhesive tape, string, ribbons and even lace were used to fasten packages.
Marbled paper was not the only option and its popularity was later supplanted by that of inexpensive coloured tissue paper. By a quirk of fate, it was a run on tissue paper of this sort, in a stationer’s shop in Kansas City, Missouri, USA, that is usually considered to be the spur to the invention of modern-style wrapping paper—initially, in designs remarkably like old-fashioned marbled paper.
Brothers Rollie and Joyce Hall sold tissue paper for gift-wrapping in white, red and green, sometimes patterned with wreaths or holly leaves, but more often simply plain. In December 1917, they sold out. Rollie then discovered in the brothers’ stockroom a supply of ‘fancy French paper’, boldly patterned sheets intended for lining envelopes. He decided to market it as wrapping paper, priced at 10c a sheet.
His gamble worked. This paper also sold out and so rapidly that the Halls decided to do the same the following year, again with considerable success. The following year, they began producing paper to designs of their own, specifically made for wrapping Christmas presents. The brothers’ company was Hallmark and the popularity of Rollie Hall’s innovation has played a key role in its long-term survival.
Despite doomsayers—including the publishers of a survey in 2017 that found that 50% of the population would be happy to receive Christmas presents unwrapped— the habit of encasing gifts in brightly coloured paper, often ornamented with ribbons, bows and labels, remains a feature of British festivities. A recent estimate calculated that British present-givers continue to use enough wrapping paper every year to circle the globe nine times or about 226,800 miles of the stuff.
Much of it is made in one factory, in Ystrad Mynach in South Wales. There, a team of more than 40 designers is employed by I. G. Design Group, the company that owns Royal Warrant-holding Christmas-cracker maker Tom Smith. At a rate of about 43 miles of paper an hour, the Welsh factory produces more than 1.6 billion feet of wrapping paper each year. For the past decade, laser-cut designs have been printed using environmentally friendly water-based inks, in a sevenday-a-week production process that begins annually in September.
Despite its market dominance, with customers from Ikea to The Queen, I. G. Design Group’s products are not the only option. For all those who consider wrapping presents a last-minute Christmas headache, undertaken in the small hours of Christmas morning, after Midnight Mass and possibly one too many glasses of mulled wine, there are those for whom the process is not only enjoyable, but creative and highly personal. The supermodel Helena Christensen has described wrapping her presents in vintage paper decorated with pine cones.
Craftier wrappers choose oldfashioned brown paper decorated with designs produced using their own stencils. Unlike Christmas cards, which have typically been sold in a choice of religious and non-religious designs, most wrapping-paper patterns favour secular images of snowmen, reindeer, garlands of evergreen foliage and Father Christmas.
Recently, interest has revived in marbled papers of the sort that were fashionable for wrapping a century and a half ago, available, for example, from Wiltshire-based marbledpaper artist Jemma Lewis.
A number of museums, such as the V&A and the British Library, whose collections include works of art on paper, produce wrapping paper to their own designs, as do a handful of shops, such as specialist map seller Stanfords. Stanfords’ designs include a London map of 1862, a 19th-century map of the recently unified Italy and one featuring an image of Christmas Island made by Capt William Mynors of the Royal Mary, an East India Company vessel. Capt Mynors was the sailor who named the island after passing it on Christmas Day 1643. Eco-wrappers can resort to imaginative recycling. Leftover wallpaper, offcuts of dress or curtain fabric used in the manner of Japanese furoshiki, the pink
pages of the Financial Times and, of course, COUNTRY LIFE covers all make handsome wrapping materials.
It’s also possible to decorate presents with ribbons, string, raffia, dried herbs, flowers and foliage, baubles and a variety of knick-knackery, festive or otherwise, such as the rusty decorative keys used by one professional giftwrapper on parcels for men.
However, you would do well to heed a note of caution from the American Hardware Dealers’ Magazine of 1911: ‘Leave the freak wrapping papers to the other fellow and you will make friends.’
‘The British use enough wrapping paper every year to circle the globe nine times ’