Kelvin discovered, at The Warehouse, why youngsters think it’s ok to flee from police!
It’s a wrap!
You’d think someone would’ve invented reusable Christmas wrap in these days of zero waste, yet the art of gift wrapping is still big business. Wrapping paper and shopping bags on their own accountfor about 4 million tons of the trash created annually in the US. In Britain, per one estimate, people throw away 365,000 kilometres of the stuff every Christmas – that’s enough to stretch nine times around the world. So yes, it is wasteful and frivolous, but it also conceals the gift until the ceremonial unwrapping and the surprise is revealed. It’s also artistic and a very old tradition. The use of wrapping paper is first documented in ancient China, where monetary gifts were wrapped with paper, forming an envelope known as a chih pao. In Japan, furoshiki, a reusable wrapping cloth, has been around since the Edo period. The Victorians used elaborately decorated paper. In 1917, things altered when a couple of brothers sold out of tissue and manila papers at their Kansas City, Missouri, stationery store and instead offered the “fancy French paper” used for lining envelopes at 10 cents a sheet. It sold out fast. A year later the brothers offered the lining paper as gift wrap. By 1919, the brothers were selling their own printed wrapping paper. Who were they? Joyce and Ronnie Hall (Hallmark).
Jeff Langford of Belmont writes: “Back in the 1970s and as an apprentice, I worked with a group of tradesmen who called their chargehand ‘Harpic’ because they thought he was clean around the bend.”
