Are holiday/Christmas cards going the way of the dodo?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I have received precisely two Christmas cards this year, and I haven’t sent any. I recall 20 years ago sending cards to a lot of people (both personal and business related) and receiving tons. The last time I sent cards - custom photo ones, at that - was 6 or 7 years ago.

I think technology has changed this tradition. I get holiday emails and holiday texts now, but not cards. Today I downloaded a cute Christmas greeting graphic I will send to a lot of people on my contacts list as a text. But I feel sort of cheap about doing it.

How has holiday card-giving changed for you?
And, is it really tacky to mass-text holiday greetings nowadays?

2

Sending more cards than ever, but this is the first year I’ve been married.

3

Yes.

4

I sent about forty, and have received about the same. It’s been holding steady the last ten years or so.

5

Well shit.
But it’s becoming quite common - I have been getting mass-texted holiday greetings of various sort from both personal and business acquaintances for several years. Why is it tacky? Because impersonal?

6

I swear I get more cards than ever. All my friends and acquaintances–even the ones I see on a weekly basis–send me cards. They are all those photo jobbies you order by the pound from Costco, so they’re really cheap and you can put like 5 photos on if you want. Not so many newsletters any more, and very few non-photo cards, but those Costco cards are everywhere.

7

I don’t send them anymore. Mailing something that can be sent digitally is seeming more and more archaic.

8

I used to send them to pretty much everybody in my (actual, not email) address book. These days, if you send me one, I’ll send you one. So far, this year, that’s three, all from my aunts.

9

We receive, and send, a huge stack of them every year. They’re extremely popular in my neck of the woods.

10

I get about 5-6 a year, and my wife and I send one each year.

I hate mass texts like that. So much so that I refuse to respond to them.

11

When I a kid my parents got tons. One of my tasks was to stand them up on the bookshelf (or for the “landscape mode” ones hang them over the top of books). The bookshelf was huge. It covered one wall probably 15+ feet wide went from about 3 feet up to the ceiling. By the time Christmas came, I was squeezing them in. There must have been several hundred.

Now we get maybe two dozen. Most of those are commercial like from the plumber. Of course, we haven’t sent any in years so we’ve probably been dropped from many lists.

12

I’m waiting for the holiday itself to go the way of the dodo.

13

I used to get and send about 20.

This year, as in the past few years, I have sent none and I have received exactly one this year.

I assume this is the norm, as I was at my sister’s place on the weekend and she was displaying only two or three; she used to get dozens.

14

I mailed exactly 12 Xmas cards this year, because I bought myself a sheet of 12 stamps and didn’t have any others handy. Previous years I’ve mailed a lot more, but I am pissed at how much stamps now cost (C$1 individually, C$0.85 each when you buy a sheet of them). I do like receiving Xmas cards (and birthday cards and easter cards, etc.), so I am a bit of a hypocrite in that regard.

I don’t think greeting cards will completely disappear as long as post offices have letter mail; grandmas and grandpas are still going to want to send cards to their multitudinous grandkids until they all die off (the grandmas/pas, not the grandkids)

15

So far this year I’ve received one and sent none. Most of the people I would have sent cards to in years past I keep up with on FB or whatever. It used to be that the Christmas card list were people you updated on the year’s activity and didn’t hear from the rest of the year. The hyperconnectedness of modern digital society has rendered that whole scenario obsolete.

16

I typically send about 50 cards, and receive about 30-40. Most of our local friends have elementary school-age kids, so prime years for photocard sending. And we have moved around over the years so we have a fairly long list of friends and family out of town that I like to send cards to.

17

My friends move around too much to make it worthwhile. I received one this year, didn’t send any out. Will sends texts and/or personal email letters.

18

Me too, same deals. except my friends moved and I didn’t.

19

My family never really sent Christmas cards, except this one card that my mom and her best friend from about 11 years old have been sending back and forth for about 40 years. (An old joke of theirs.)

For years, I would have all these intentions of sending cards to all my friends and I would buy boxes of cards cheap after the holidays. And I never did. Finally, it got to the point that I never sent any cards, but happily got them from friends who did have their shit together that much.

Then there were fewer of those friends/intersected with “Happy Holidays/Merry Christmas” to the people I might’ve felt like I should send a card to, and I don’t even fret about it.

This year, one of the friends, I call her (from a comic strip) ‘The Woman Who Does Everything Better Than You’–hasn’t sent me a card.

We got a card from The Fella’s daughter of her, her hubby (finally out of the military) and the toddler that was AFREAKINGDORABLE!

and out of the blue? A Christmas card from my mother. *

With cats on it. (My parents never wanted cats…so they have two.)

She wrote in it: I should’ve warned you to take a benadryl before you opened this!

(I’ve become allergic to cats as I’ve gotten older and when we visit, I have to slam some (generic) benadryl and I still end up with bright pink stoner eyes and sneeze constantly.)

*We’re spending Christmas WITH my parents, so… why did she send me a card?

20

We haven’t sent them for about twenty years. Still receive a few, though. I don’t care enough about them to set them out; they get opened (maybe), read once, then back in the envelope.