All hail the gift bag!

Once upon a time, back in the last century, stores sold something during the holiday season called a gift box. It came in several sizes. There were square boxes and rectangular boxes, big and small boxes, tall and short boxes. The giver would place a gift in a box, wrap it in brightly colored paper, and possibly even top it off with a pretty bow. The creative gift giver might even fashion a bow from scratch, instead of using the stick-on variety.

Now the engineers of gift packaging have come up with what the public clearly views as an improvement: the gift bag. You might still find the occasional gift box in retail shops, but the bag has shoved the box into a dark and dingy corner of the holiday display, a lonely, unloved and unwanted throwback.

The gift box has become a dinosaur. Extinction looms. Laziness has decreed that the gift bag is a far superior item, because the giver simply plops a gift in the bag and is done with it. No more measuring and cutting and wrapping and taping pesky pieces of paper. No ribbons. No bows. No quaint notions about the recipient being deserving of a bit of extra effort. The gift box is labor-intensive, like a car with manual windows that you roll up. The gift bag is easy peasy.

I associate boxes with gifs; bags with groceries and, on a smaller scale, dog poop. But that's just me. Old school. Progress is unstoppable.