Do you remember when the shirt box was a big part of gift-giving? It was used for actual tops – velour anyone? – and bottoms too. If an item fit in a 14″ x 9″ -ish cardboard container it was going in. It would be lovingly placed in its packaging, cocooned in tissue paper, artfully folded to conceal the present within.
Drum roll please, Little Drummer Boy
Then along came the gift bag and tissue paper was never the same again. Gifts are now dropped into a decorated bag in various forms: draped in gift wrap or tissue paper, with cheerful spikes of tissue paper poking out of the top of the bag. Like cheese and chocolate, most people feel they can never use enough of the paper-thin, malleable sheets. When the peaks rising out of a gift bag don’t look just right we just keep adding tissue paper until they do.
It comes in all different colors, but the original white harkens back to the shirt boxes of yesterday and does the job no matter the color of the gift bag. When you can’t see color, white is a friend, saving you from frustration and sending pictures of tissue paper to friends to ask if it goes with the also photographed bag. That said, I think we are all suckers for a coordinated bag/tissue paper ensemble and the color options are infinite. Some gift bags even come with matching paper or should I say some tissue paper comes with its own bag as this post’s purpose is to exalt the silent star of any occasion.
Now the hard part. When possible we save the tissue paper to use again, leaving it in its bag for a future celebration. But at the underbelly of a special day is the tissue paper gathered up and thrown away without a thought. After all, you can buy it at the dollar store, right? I, myself, do what I can and recycle the wrinkled and sometimes torn remains of an opened gift. I find it a little sad to see the discarded tissue paper balled up in the trash can or recycle bin, balls of color tossed away while the gift it so beautifully adorned is displayed or put into use.
We all know where we’d be without toilet paper or at least we would if we all had a ridiculous mind like mine and as evidenced by this post, “ridiculous” is meant in its most absurd way. But a world without tissue paper would be a whole lot less festive. And nobody wants that. Except for the shirt box, of course.
