Finnish Christmas wrapping paper is printed in Lempäälä near Tampere

One year’s work, 5,000 kilometres of Christmas wrapping paper, is torn and thrown into the garbage bin within a few hours

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By Eeva Palm
     
      ”We have Christmas around the year”, says Sales Director Erja Sulasaari-Mäki from Pyrollpack Ltd.
      Sulasaari-Mäki reports that she is already negotiating new contracts on next year’s Christmas wrapping paper, even though the latest rolls are still waiting to be taken to the cutters.
      Today, Pyroll is the only manufacturer of Christmas wrapping paper in Finland. Some 5,000 kilometres of gift wrapping paper with Christmas ornaments are printed to be used for packaging gifts. The amount would be enough to cover the surface of the road between Hanko and Inari - in Northern Lapland - four times.
      Most of it will end up in the bin within the space of a few fleeting hours on December 24th.
     
Established in 1973, the privately-owned Pyroll Group is one of the leading paper and paperboard converters in the Nordic countries.
      Pyroll continues the Christmas wrapping production that it bought from United Paper Mills (UPM). Included in the deal, Payroll got the old pattern books, some of them dating back to the 1960s.
      No wonder, then, that Christmas wrapping paper sometimes looks familiar, as it really is more or less known to all of us.
     
The background of the paper might have been changed, but the Christmas gnomes, Santas, snowmen, and reindeer are all the same as those in the paper used for wrapping Christmas gifts when we were children.
      ”Finns love the red colour, but blue is shunned, while wraps with a light background are regarded as too transparent, as they could reveal the gifts too soon”, says Sulasaari-Mäki, speaking from experience.
      Christmas wrapping paper will not be out-of-date one year later, as in this business the trends change slowly. Nevertheless, new designs are bought worldwide every year.
     
Most new designs are bought from Brazil, as their Father Christmas looks Finnish, in fact more jovial and chubbier than his Swedish colleague, a tall and thin man with a beard, Sulasaari-Mäki reports.
      Artists also frequently offer their designs for sale. Most often it is a question of only one picture, which will then be sketched on paper to be printed by a roll printing machine. The artist often remains unknown. However, the animal figures designed by Finnish illustrator and author Mauri Kunnas hardly need any introduction.
      Every design has a name of its own. ”We hold Christenings of new wrapping papers. The name is always linked with the pictorial motif of the paper”, says the Sales Director, admitting that sometimes the names are forgotten.
     
Pyroll makes its Christmas wrappings from domestic paper, and water-soluble dyes are used for the patterns.
      Those Christmas papers which are marked with a key flag, indicating that a product has been manufactured in Finland, can also be recycled.
      The production includes a total of some twenty designs of Pyroll’s own as well as the patterns ordered by customer companies.
      Sulasaari-Mäki claims that she usually starts to look for and design new patterns right after Christmas, and the only time she really forgets all about Christmas is during the summer holidays.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 8.12.2008


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Bank survey forecasts Finns could spend 20% less on Christmas than last year (27.11.2008)

Links:
  Pyroll Group

EEVA PALM / Helsingin Sanomat
eeva.palm@hs.fi