Americans Spend the Equivalent of the Red Cross’ Budget on Wrapping Paper
By: Intuitive Izzy
Tags: Society, Money Management, Social Change, Holiday Tradition, Christmas

For years I’ve been contemplating the capitalist agendas hidden in Christianity’s most sacred holiday.

I was reminded of this today when I clicked on my Facebook Memories and a couple of posts popped up. It seems that for the last several years I’ve been questioning not only my personal beliefs in the Christmas holiday but also how much corporate America has been involved in curating it’s importance.

When I read what I wrote back in 2016, the first thing that came to mind was wrapping paper.

Wrapping paper is a costly and weird holiday tradition

I never understood wrapping paper. I remember back when I was a kid it was always my job to clean up the wrapping paper mess left behind by everyone. It was my job at nearly every Christmas gathering of the families, and I had several to go to. My parents were divorced, my mom’s parents were divorced and my step-father’s parents were divorced — that made for a lot of stops during the holidays, and for me a lot of wrapping paper to clean up.

It was probably my hatred of picking it up that sparked my idea of wrapping paper being the most useless part of Christmas but it is still something I feel strongly about.

It’s actual trash. It isn’t something the recycling centers are looking forward to. In fact, it’s actually not something that is beneficial for them at all.

It’s just trash and not something we really need.

We can wrap presents in other things, more useful and meaningful things, like scarves, letters we wrote to the person or pictures we drew for them.

Instead, we spend an astronomical amount of money on wrapping paper that just gets ripped up and tossed aside.

As with many statistics, the numbers on the amount we spend on wrapping paper during the holidays varies across resources so there aren’t direct numbers. To please the inevitable naysayers, I’ve chosen to use the median of the two lowest statistics I could find.

Those estimates show that Americans spend about $3 billion on wrapping paper each year.

Some show that Americans spend more double that on covering their gifts in paper they throw away.

Let me put that into perspective, that’s enough money to give every person living in America $1 Million dollars and still have $2.5 billion dollars left over. (nearly the entire budget of the American Red Cross)

More staggering is that if only 1/3 of the money we used to buy wrapping paper was donated to a fund we could still afford to make everyone in America a millionaire.

This statistic alone made me nearly positive that this is wrapped up in the capitalist giants that keep us thinking we need to make money to afford all these things that are often harming us and are sometimes quite literally trash.

As with all things that have become something the majority thinks they have to do to be happy and healthy, wrapping presents started as a classist practice that showed you could afford the luxury of the Victorian era. While wrapping things has gone back much farther than that, it wasn’t until we all started to see consumption as a sign of strength that it became the mainstream marker it is today.

Wrapping paper is just one of traditions we have that is no longer serving us. As we grow in population, we have a responsibility to continue to evaluate our practices and traditions to make sure they are still serving the collective and the planet that provides our resources.

Unfortunately, this evaluation process is not one that is regular nor prioritized.

Instead, upholding the status quo and carrying on the traditions exactly as they are is tied to respect. Doing anything outside of that is seen as disrespectful and in today’s society respect is definitely something you want to be sure other people think you have and are worthy of.

Tying these traditions of hooking up lights to the power grid (which is already overworked) and spending money on excess to respect makes it almost certain that the evaluation of the practices isn’t on anyone’s mind.

This enables us to just carry on spending our money on the things they tell us we need to be happy and successful, even if it’s just trash.

It’s not just that just our own minds that think we must uphold the status quo, it’s also embedded into the fibers of our society.

Every January, children get assignments to write about what they got for Christmas.

Just that alone puts pressure on parents to get enough gifts, maybe more than they can afford, because children compare themselves to each other based on these gifts — and school environments may even perpetuate that.

There are so many examples of these types of societal ways that keep us upholding the status quo and effectively staying in the hamster wheel of this capitalist life. While I realize that there are much bigger problems in the world than the cost of wrapping paper, I think it’s more about what the cost of the wrapping paper represents.

It represents proof that we do have the money to take control back but we are using it in ways that aren’t serving us.

It represents how we use our resources as a result of these societal systems.

It represents how conditioned we are in our beliefs about money — both how to get it and what we must get it for.

It represents a societal system that would rather charge us for actual trash than help us get what we need.

And ultimately, it shows us just how much power we do hold if we use these resources in better ways.

Instead of fighting the fight their way and waiting for them to listen to us, let’s just come together, donate our wrapping paper money, accept unwrapped gifts and then our reality will change.