I could live the rest of my life without sending or receiving a paper card. Ecards, however, I like just fine. I don’t like the cost and waste of paper cards - I look at it, I laugh or just say thank you, then I take it home and put it in the recycling. I also don’t like the tiny twinge of guilt for throwing away something that someone I care about has given me, but I’m just not prepared to keep every card I’m given.
For the record, we don’t do thank you cards in Canada except for wedding presents, so my views may be skewed. I didn’t understand for the longest time what everyone was talking about with sending thank you cards - you mean you are expected to send a thank you card for EVERYTHING? Wouldn’t that be a huge pain in the ass?
Greeting cards could also be “Happy Birthday” etc. of course. But WRT your question in my circles I would guess no for Christmas gifts.
Yes for graduation, wedding, bridal showers, baby showers. Maybe the common thread is “outpouring.” E.g. if you had a housewarming and lots of ppl were bringing you gifts, would you send thank you cards?
FWIW, the woman/father in the OP are Jewish (he both by race and religion, she only by race since she converted to Christianity).
Well, there are 2/$1 cards at the Dollar Store that, if you search hard enough, aren’t too bad. I held a beautiful card from a grocery store in my hand until I realized it cost almost $5, and I am NOT going to spend $5 on a greeting card, no matter how beautiful. Hallmark can kiss my ass. I went to the arts n’ crafts store and bought rubber stamps, stickers, card stock, etc. and now I make my OWN personalized greeting cards. I can download any picture from the computer, too, and glue it on. The trick is to be very, very precise, don’t let your work of art get sloppy, leave traces of glue, or pencil lines… … I save the really pretty or funny cards I do get in the mail. If it’s an animal, it gets taped to the pantry door as part of a montage. I hold onto greeting cards for about a month, then if there’s nothing special about them, out they go with the paper recyclables.
The wife of a friend sends me a card on all the holidays and I love her for it. It is nice to know that someone is thinking of me. At Christmas I would rather get a unique Christmas card than a buy-by-the-doze card and I certainly wonder what people are thinking when I get a picture of their kids, but I still appreciate the sentiment.
I used to have a girlfriend who would send me a card out of the blue. It was one of the things that endeared her to me. She was the only one of my girlfriends to do this, and it made me feel special.
When I get a greeting card, it’s like someone from across the country saying, “would you throw this away for me?” It would never occurr to me to send one. I don’t really read them.
I don’t like E-cards, mostly because I always suspect they’re spam/a virus/something of that nature. Half the time I don’t open them as a result, or check with the sender to confirm that they actually sent it. (Even then I worry I’ll get additional spam as a result of my address being given out.)
I’m not a big fan of pre-printed greeting cards, but they’re acceptable for everything except thank you notes. I have blank stationery in my house - envelopes, small notecards, and paper - and prefer using that to write a personal note.
I think they are a total waste of time, money and effort. I used to give my ex-wife one for her birthday but only a blank one with no message so that I had to write the whole thing myself. She liked them and even framed some favourites (probably consigned to the fireplace now).
One year I collected all my Christmas cards. The next year I crossed out my name and put the sender’s name, crossed out the senders signature and substituted mine. I then sent them back. I don’t get Christmas cards any more.
I went to a birthday party a few weeks ago and all the gifts were parked on a table. I still haven’t received a thank-you card, and I gotta say I’m a little annoyed. He thanked me for coming to the party, but he had no idea whether I’d given him a gift or not, so the thank you wasn’t for that.
I was part of the Christmas and Valentine’s Day exchanges here on the boards, and I’m looking forward to the next holiday. I smiled all week opening beautiful hand made cards from Dopers. AND cards fron Europe!
I send a hand written thank you note for every gift received. It’s not too much of a hassle to buy a card or writing paper and spend just .42 in postage so that the person who spent the time to shop for me understands how much his effort is appreciated.
I send a thank you note if I spend the night as a guest in someone’s home.
Agreed, E-cards suck, and I definitely won’t open one unless it’s very clear it’s legit; calling me by my name and identifying the sender by name. Even then I hesitate.
I’m sure you didn’t mean it to sound like this (since you used a parenthetical explanation), but that sounds so condescending it’s not funny.
I’m not a big greeting card person, but my grandma is, so I get them for: Christmas, my birthday, Valentine’s Day, Easter and maybe a couple other occasions. She’s also a huge fan of getting the sappiest ones and I look forward to reading the tooth-achingly sweet poems followed by her old fashioned cursive, saying, “[name], I wish you a very happy birthday. You are a very special young lady and I love you very, very much. XOXO- Grandma”.
And e-cards suck. I find 99% of them lame, but a worse lame than greeting cards. Plus, no one later on will find them. We were cleaning out the attic of my grandma’s house last month and came across a birthday card that my grandma sent to my grandpa when they were courting. She signed it with a nickname we never knew she had used (Tinny. How cute!) and you could see she had saved up her money to get a pretty card with a little bit of ribbon (and in the early 40s during the war? You bet that cost a lot) and used her most flowery pretty-loopy handwriting. Your grandkids won’t ever find something cool like that when you only send e-cards.
Huge waste of money and resources. Same with easter/valentines candy and christmas/birthday presents. I’ll still get them for other people, as they expect them, but if you want to get me something, use the money you would have spent on me to pay down your debt. My family is not well off, and we all need the money more than an overpriced piece of scrap paper.
Not sure what you mean, exactly. We cut down trees to make the paper, and the manufacturing process pollutes. We leave harvested areas open to erosion if they aren’t re-forested, etc., and end up dumping the barely read cards in landfills. Granted, we’re getting better in these areas and try to recycle more, but skipping the card in the first place would circumvent the issues entirely.
Well, another example: I don’t really eat meat, but I can’t stand when some vegetarians will say basically the same WRT eating meat; that people are “uninformed” about the cruelty of eating meat.
Nitpick: I said “less-informed.” And I shouldn’t have used a hyphen, I think.
I don’t mean to imply that I have the high moral ground on this, hence my question of how others view it. People can and do keep the Hallmark tradition going. IMO it’s largely a waste of resources, but others are free to do as they see fit. Like I said at least we’re getting better on some fronts.
And there are issues beside the conservation stuff. It doesn’t seem “evil” to me (to use the vegetarian example by parallel), but it does seem “silly.” And if the intent is to show someone you care, then sending out the exact same card with a signature in it—well, it takes effort, but it doesn’t make me feel like a unique snowflake or anything.
You’re coomparing apples to oranges, comparing vegetarianism to paper greeting cards. Unless people are vegetarian because of the waste of resources growing cows, vegetarianism is a moral issue and wasting resources on a piece of paper that is read once and thrown away is an economic issue. It doesn’t matter what your moral stand on greeting cards is; empirically speaking, cutting down trees to make cards that are being replaced by electronic cards is a waste of resources.
And why do you (or at least, the OP) automatically assume they are “less informed” on this matter? Maybe they are informed and just don’t care as much as you do.
