I stil send about two dozen every year, but get nowhere near that many back, especially since I moved overseas.
Really trimmed the list after my divorce, when I found out who my friends really were; my ex and I were fairly affluent due to his work, so I’d send pressies and things to most of the people on my list.
When we divorced, I was unemployed and a fraction of an inch financially from living out of my car; I was still able to scrape enough together to send small cards, but it was amazing [sarcasm alert] how many people disappeared once they realised I was broke and the gravy train stopped pouring in their direction. I even had one guy, a long time friend since uni, send me a curt note that he wasn’t going to give me any money. Super, but I hadn’t asked for, nor implied, that I wanted/needed a handout, you twat.
Facebook really has rendered a lot of the photo cards obsolete. I probably don’t need to see another photo of my cousin’s kids when she’s already posted 2,516 photos of them during the last year.
I still send regular greeting cards with handwritten messages, but I keep the list very small. Photo cards with nothing handwritten on them really bug me. They seem so impersonal.
That doesn’t help, but the main thing is that it’s no work for the sender but interrupts a whole bunch of people. If you want to do this over email, fine, I’ll read it when I get around to it. But interrupting my day to regurgitate a cheap sentiment? Tacky.
To add injury to insult, I hear that in the US you actually have to pay to receive text messages!
I’ve gotten very few this year - usually we get a fair number, mostly from family. We’re sending them out for the first time in years because we have a baby, so we had totally bourgeois photo cards made of the baby with Santa. Seriously. My god we have become old and boring.
Text mssgs can’t possibly be more impersonal than receiving a card with a pre-printed sentiment + a scrawled signature, which is the majority of the cards I receive.
I don’t think they’re going the way of the dodo (yet) but they’re definitely not as significant as in years/decades past. Maybe in another couple of decades there will be a surge revival, the way knitting and canning food and other things we associate with grandmas have become popular again.
The customs and unritten rules about holday card exchange may be changing due to the influence of social media – but it’s not a uniform change for all people, or even “intra-personally” for all relationships (e.g. a young adult might digitally spread Xmas cheer to his Facebook buddies and also send cards to older relatives).
For my wife and I personally? We’ve been sending ca. 35-40 Xmas cards out for several years now. Used to get about 30 back … this year it’s going to be maybe 15. And they’ve come a lot later than in the past – used to have a healthy dozen or so before the first week of December was done. That initial rush of cards is now a late beat-the-buzzer rush of cards received over the last few days.
We sent over 100 cards this year and have received about half that number back. Sending out cards is easy with a simple spreadsheet and mail-merged labels.
Sending out mass emails or texts is just tacky and lazy.
I used to send cards to both sides of the family - mainly to parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles - but that petered down to pretty much none now. Most of the older relatives are dead, and among those still living, between the dementia and the bad eyes, cards are all but meaningless. I used to use the cards as a once-a-year catch-up letter to these relatives (not a mega letter - each would get an individual note) but I don’t remember the last time I did that.
This year, I sent 1 card - and that was just as a means to send some restaurant gift cards to my inlaws, since we’re not going to Florida for Christmas this year. We’ve received one from the inlaws, one from my husband’s youngest aunt, one mass-produced unsigned homemade card-like object from my sister, one from our financial advisor, and one from the Harley dealership where my husband buys bike stuff. Oh, and there was a card in my Secret Santa box.
I send out holiday cards every year and only about 20% of the people I mail bother to send anything back. The majority come from older family members like parents and aunts/uncles. After pretty much talking on Facebook about how much I love holiday cards and I’d really love it if I could receive some in return, I managed to get (so far) two more cards than usual this year out of friends.
For the record, all my holiday cards are hand-made, my friends absolutely gush over them and practically trip over themselves getting me their new addresses, and yet most can’t be bothered to get me a hallmark card in return or scribble something on a sheet of paper. Yeah, I do feel a little unappreciated. But I still love making the cards themselves so I’ll keep doing it for a while yet…
So the short of it is, older generations are sending me cards as strong as ever. Those in the 30 and under bracket definitely aren’t. They don’t text either, they just don’t really acknowledge the holiday to anyone outside their immediate family.
We still send out about 50-60 cards every year, but we make our own cards and try to come up with a humorous theme. Folks now look forward to getting them. We receive about half the amount we send out.
They are gradually becoming less common, but not dying off very rapidly and in no danger of extinction for a good while. Many of my younger relatives send them. (And a few of my contemporaries don’t.) In fact, we are starting to get “Thanksgiving Cards” and such from the younger ones.
Well, upon reading the replies here I now get why I’m not getting many cards - I haven’t been sending them!
For the record, I’ve never felt inconvenienced or belittled by getting a holiday text, I appreciate them actually. One acquaintance sends an epically corny occasion-related joke every holiday and they always make me smile. The whole thing of buying cards, buying stamps, signing a name to some glurgy or silly commercial card doesn’t feel that much different than a text - which is cheaper, more environmentally friendly, and basically says the same thing: Hey there, Merry Christmas! Buying a bunch of cards and firing them off with your name attached isn’t, to me, any more personal than sending a text or email card. Just more expensive and wasteful.
That said I get that personal/thoughtful/handmade/timely cards are really nice to receive. I will try to be more organized in that regard next year.
Since I at least want to acknowledge people who have been important to me over the last 12 months, I sent texts today. “Merry Christmas” to those I know to be at least marginally Christian, “Seasons Greetings” to those not. Thought that counts, right?
Chiroptera: I don’t think the comments were about texting holiday greetings as much as mass texts. Most people welcome a funny holiday picture or personal message, it’s sending the same message to everyone or nearly everyone on one’s contact list that people were discouraging. I sent (and received) cards well before the holiday but also sent (and received) a few personal texts from close friends on Christmas Day itself.
Not that this isn’t all a little late for this Christmas. :smack:
