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Call it the nightmare before Christmas.
We spend more than $3 billion a year on Christmas wrapping, including paper, bow and ribbons, say estimates.
And that doesn’t count the cost of hours spent hiding in the bedroom, wrestling with paper and oddly-shaped gifts, juggling string and Scotch tape, hunting for the scissors, and risking injury by using those scissors to curl ribbons.
Unless you’re one of the favored few who can wrap presents perfectly every time, it’s an experience that often ends in disappointment, too. No matter how hard you try, the presents you place under the tree never seem to look like the ones in the commercials.
But if this is you, good news is at hand.
The whole ritual is a giant waste of time, new research suggests. And it’s counterproductive, too. People are likely to end up happier if you wrap your presents badly than if you take the extra time to wrap them well.
So reveals a recent paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, written by University of Nevada business professors Jessica and Brett Rixom and Vanderbilt University marketing postdoctoral fellow Erick Mas.
See also: Want to spark joy with your gifts this holiday season? Scientists have a solution
They found this effect after running multiple studies where they gave the same gift to different people, either wrapped beautifully or badly. And it gels with other consumer psychology research, they say.
“[P]articipants had more favorable attitudes toward sloppily- than neatly wrapped gifts, regardless of whether gifts were undesirable,” they report. “[N]eat wrapping has a negative effect while sloppy wrapping has a positive effect on gift-related attitudes, regardless of gift desirability. Thus, wrapping gifts sloppily vs. neatly can be a more effective gift-giving strategy.”
No, really.
The explanation? It’s the expectations game, the researchers found.
People who receive a sloppily-wrapped gift automatically have their expectations set low. And that means they end up happier with the gift than they would be otherwise, no matter what the gift.
The researchers found this was true even when they handed out Orlando Magic mugs to fans of the Miami Heat.
Meanwhile the reverse is also true. When a present is wrapped beautifully, it sets expectations high.
Too high.
And that means the person receiving the gift is likely to end up less happy with it than they would be otherwise. In other words, it’s not enough just to give the right gift. You also have to manage expectations.
The researchers added one caveat. This rule typically works with family and friends. But it may not work the same way with mere acquaintances, or others who may question the relationship. For them, a sloppily-wrapped present may signal that you don’t really value the relationship that much.
(Then again, this may raise again the question of why you are being expected to give Christmas presents to people you barely know. And if you have to, a present that already comes beautifully packaged — like luxury chocolates, for example — solves the problem easily.)
Meanwhile, for everyone else? You aren’t being lazy if you wrap your family and friends’ gifts badly. You’re doing them a favor. It’s a kindness. You’re setting their expectations low for Christmas morning. They will be all the more delighted with whatever you’ve bought.
So you can heave a huge sigh of relief, put down the scissors, and pick up the eggnog.
