Blame it on the recession. Blame it on Facebook. Blame it on the 44-cent first-class stamp. This is the year a lot of people we know decided not to bother with Christmas cards.
You may have suspected this based on the contents of your mailbox, but there are numbers to prove it: The Greeting Card Association estimates that 1.5 billion cards were sold this holiday season, down from 2.7 billion a decade ago. The U.S. Postal Service pegs the volume of cards, letters and packages it handled this year as down by more than a third compared to 2007.
We’ve read several blog posts recently that hark back to the days when families drank cocoa and listened to Christmas carols on the Victrola while signing, addressing and stamping the cards, assembly-line style. That’s not the way we remember it, but never mind. Nothing says “I can’t be troubled to wish you a proper Merry Christmas” quite like tweeting a photo of the cat with a bow on its head to 1,000 of your closest “followers.” We miss those handwritten cards.
Not that we’ve written any ourselves lately. Our usual drill is to order up a couple hundred photo cards, print out a dozen sheets of labels from our electronic address book, buy two rolls of stamps and set the whole pile of stuff aside until … later.
What’s the hurry? Thanks to social media, our friends don’t have to wait till the holidays to catch up; they hear from us every time we water our crops on Farmville. They know what we had for breakfast. They know what we thought of last night’s episode of “Glee.” They’ve seen enough of the kids already. They’ve seen the cat with a bow on its head.
Lately they’ve joined in our exhaustive colloquies about whether signing, addressing and mailing Christmas cards is a mindless time suck. Meanwhile, those cards aren’t exactly sending themselves.
We happened to be on Facebook the other day when we read the warm and fuzzy story of two families who have mailed the same gigantic Christmas card back and forth for 26 years. Weddings, babies, new homes, dogs — all documented in ever-tinier print. It’s so much more thoughtful than hitting the “Reply” button, or re-tweeting. So yeah, we’re going to send our cards. Look for them by July.
