It’s Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day! Not only is it Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day, it’s the 50th anniversary of the invention of Bubble Wrap. That means celebrating the soft crackly packing material/best unintentional toy for kids (whether they’re actual kids or the full grown variety) ever pretty much has to be on all of our “to do” lists.
BWAD is celebrated every year on the last Monday of January. This fabulous holiday was created in 2001, when “Spirit 95″ a local radio station in Bloomington, Indiana, started the tradition. It’s spread like wildfire across the internet – there are hundreds of Bubble Wrap oriented Facebook groups and every year Bubble Wraps special holiday sparks tons of Twitter chatter.
Bubble wrap was invented by a pair of engineers, Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes, in 1957. They founded the Sealed Air Company in 1960 to sell their new, unexpectedly addictive packing material. The term “bubble wrap” is, like Kleenex and Q-tip, a brand name that has become common vernacular for the object itself, including it’s generic copy cats.
While bubble wrap is well known as a packing material, it’s even better known as a thoroughly entertaining form of play and stress relief. There are even digital bubble wrap computer games designed to help blow off steam (though no where near as effective as the real thing). The easiest way to celebrate? You could go check out www.bubblewrapfun.com or http://www.fast-pack.com/bubblewrapappreciation.html for fun ideas and silly pictures of your fellow devotee’s. Or, you could just bring home a couple of yards of the good stuff and see what kind of mischief young minds can come up with – inevitably you’ll find yourself with some silly pictures of your own!
Comments
Crystal Arcand
January 25th, 2010 - 11:16:37 AM
Huzzah for bubble wrap! Our whole family (right down to the four-year-old) likes to play with the bubble wrap application on the iTouch!
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