The Message of the Season

Thinking about signing the LCO’s “seasonal” cards last week and as I receive the e-cards with their good wishes (for winter, it seems, given their images), I’m prompted to consider what part these cards play today.

Except among our most intimate friends, whom we know to continue celebrating Christmas, both sets of cards, sent to all and sundry, strive to be neutral. We hope paper cards are recycled (paper, that is, not the cards themselves). Perhaps supporting a charity helps to offset other sins? With a bit of extra thought, a strong wrist and patience, the hard card can be more personal – although so often they are not – with the signatures of several people with special business relationships to certain of the recipients. They cost money to buy and to send. But for some of us, at least, a display of cards makes a change from the usual office decor, especially if we do not otherwise decorate for the season and so we like to receive them. And most people at least open the envelope and take a look at the card.

Of course, fewer people send cards these days, for many reasons, and more people send e-cards than was the case a few years ago. I think for the most part these replace hard cards, rather than expand the holiday wishes circle. Once created (and that could cost money, although the proportionate cost would be relative to the numbers of people the card represents and the number of people to whom it is sent), the only real effort involved is for the person who develops the list and clicks the keyboard. Nothing personal about these cards, generally (something like those holiday letters that arrive from friends). They come from an organization and represent everyone’s best wishes. But they can also be designed in a way that is simply not possible for hard cards (I received one this morning from Blakes (“everyone at Blakes”) wishing me and my family and friends holiday wishes, that was a series of lovely winter scenes, ending with a rollicking stars graphic, and with jolly music), although sometimes they are amazingly uncreative (I won’t even give initials). They are also very easy to delete.

“Holiday” cards are a networking/relationship building (your choice) exercise for the most part when sent from organizations. This is definitely true of the e-card, since it is rarely personal (although it could be sent from a particular person rather than the whole organization). Hard cards provide more of an opportunity to explain why the relationship matters, but there isn’t always something really particular to say and it can be a big task.

Maybe the e-card is really only highlighting the purpose served by the hard card, but I hope not. I’d prefer to think that the hard card is a reminder that at this time of year, whatever else has changed in how we identify it and celebrate it, it contains the vestiges of a time when people try to transcend the everyday and increasingly impersonal and superficial world in so many ways. (That sentence contains both my usual cynicism and – for me – an unusual sentimentalism.)

Anyway, maybe next year, the LCO will be sending out e-cards!