We send care packages to show others that we care, of course. Originally, though, a CARE package was a shipment of supplies from the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe, a group of civic, social, religious, and labor organizations that banded together to help survivors struggling to rebuild their lives after World War II. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Care Package Origin”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
If you have a kid in college or a loved one overseas, it’s nice to send them a CARE package, right? Because it shows that you care.
Exactly.
But you might be surprised to learn that the CARE in CARE package started out as an acronym.
What?
In 1946, CARE stood for Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe. And this was an organization of civic groups that had formed to fight poverty and hunger in the wake of World War II.
And this organization called CARE distributed millions of packages that contained things like dried milk and canned meat and margarine.
Yeah.
Lots of spam.
Probably, yeah.
And a few comfort items like chocolate and coffee.
And initially, people in this country, in the United States, would pay a fee to have a care package sent to family or friends back in Europe. But as time went on, people started donating money to have packages go to anyone in need in Europe.
They would arrive addressed simply to a schoolteacher in Germany, or I like this one, to a hungry occupant of a thatched cottage.
Isn’t that lovely?
How adorable is that? Sending these packages off across the sea.
To do their good deeds in the empty void of somewhere else.
Yeah, and CARE went on to become one of the largest humanitarian organizations in the world doing anti-poverty work. And along the way, it’s changed its name a couple of times.
It went from the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe to the Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere. And it’s now known as the Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere.
And anyway, that’s the inspiration behind the CARE package that we give today.
That’s very cool.
Now, the question is, did they name the organization to fit the word CARE, or is it the other way around?
Good point.
I said acronym, but it’s probably better described as a bacronym.
Right.
They found the word CARE, decided they wanted to use it, and then named it themselves so that it would match up.
But I was really surprised to learn that story. It wasn’t until the early 1960s that we started using the term care package as something that you would give to you.
Just generically, like the thing that you would send your kid in college.
Yeah, yeah, or that you leave on the desk of somebody who’s having a bad day or something.
This makes me want to go watch or re-watch that really lovely movie, 34 Charing Cross Road.
Oh, I haven’t seen that.
The relationship between a woman in the U.K. and a man in New York, and it’s after the war, and he sends her stuff.
Sends her packages of things and they have a correspondence back and forth. And there’s a book too.
Oh yeah, yeah. I read the book. But it’s very lovely. Yeah. Language has a story behind every part of it.
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