A Short History Of Not Knowing What Is Inside

The concealed gift is not a modern marketing invention, which surprises people who assume it is.

Humans have been deliberately hiding things in order to reveal them for an extremely long time, and the pattern shows up almost everywhere you look.

Wrapping Was Always The Point

Consider how odd wrapping paper is as a concept. Material produced specifically to be destroyed within seconds, whose only function is to delay information by a few moments.

Nobody needs it. A gift works perfectly well handed over plainly. And yet essentially every gift-giving culture independently arrived at concealment, which tells you the concealment is doing something the gift alone does not.

The Things Inside Other Things

The pattern repeats across completely unrelated traditions, and the resemblance is striking.

• Coins baked into celebration cakes, where finding it means good fortune for the year.
• Nesting dolls, which are entirely about the reveal and have no other purpose.
• A charm hidden in a pudding, in more than one country, arrived at separately.
• The party favour that must be broken open rather than opened.
• Doors on a calendar, which exist purely to ration information across a month.

None of these traditions borrowed from the others. They all worked out the same thing.

What They All Have In Common

In every case the hidden item is modest. A coin, a charm, a small sweet, a paper hat.

The value was never in the object. It was in the moment of finding, and everybody involved understood that perfectly. Nobody was disappointed that the thing in the cake was only a coin.

Why It Still Works On Us

You would think we would have grown out of it. We have not, and the reason is fairly simple.

A revealed thing has a story attached ~ the moment you found out. A plainly handed-over thing has no story, just an owner.

People remember how they got things far more reliably than they remember the things themselves.

Which Is The Whole Idea

Every one of those traditions worked out, independently, that the discovering is the gift and the object is the excuse.

That is a very old piece of knowledge, and it has aged remarkably well.

Written by MYSTERY TEES. Thanks for reading.