So the season of goodwill is upon us again, and that can mean only one thing: everyone's desks and mantelpieces are full of crappy little pieces of card with hackneyed imagery and lame visual jokes on the front. In January they will be ceremonially swept into the bin and end up decomposing in some landfill somewhere, except for the ones with bits of foil and tinsel and inexpensive electronic components that play music, which won't even degrade and will just sit in the ground for decades as a polluting memorial to an event which happens every single year.
Yeah. Greetings cards? Not really a fan.
It used to make sense. You would send a card through the post to your geographically distant friends and family members as a thoughtful gesture that even though you might not see them this season, they were still in your thoughts. And they could put the card on their mantelpiece as a reminder of you too. It was an elegant arrangement that bridged loved ones that were separated by distance, and only a cynic would have had a problem with it.
Here's the thing, though. We don't live in 1850 any more. We have cars, we have phones, we have the internet. We're not out of contact with people. Not ever. It's trivially easy to have a conversation with your aunt in London or your ex-housemate in San Jose. And yet christmas card sending habits have gone the other way -- people routinely send cards to their coworkers, people they see every day1. Is the art of conversation so far dead that people have to rely on the contents of an envelope to express a heartwarming sentiment to somebody? What happened to telling people you care? With actual words?
Going to the shops and spending 90p on a message that somebody else has crafted is not a substitute for simply telling somebody 'have a good christmas' and meaning it. That way at least the message comes from you and not some army of focus-group-obsessed Hallmark sentiment engineers.
I don't want to offend anyone, because I think most people just don't give much thought to these issues, they just send cards because it's tradition and everybody does it. So I'm not criticising anyone for doing the 'done thing', just trying to point the problems with it and hopefully get people to consider their reasons for participating in a tradition that is both ubiquitous and unnecessary.
I'm not sending any cards this year. Instead of contributing to the bottom line of a big company2, I've sent a cheque to the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust. Please consider doing the same for a charity you support. And in any event, whether you agree with me or not, please don't send me a card. I have phone and IM and email, and conversations are much nicer than cardboard, and will never end up in the bin.
1 My current workplace is an exception to this, where we've had a whip-round instead of sending cards to one another. Yes, I have allies in my campaign.
2 Think it's much different when you buy charity-branded cards? Nope.
I buy my charity-branded cards direct from the charity in question, which that BBC News piece says means they get at least half of what I spend.
But then, I don't send many cards anyway. I think I bought a box of 25 last year and barely used half. I certainly don't believe in sending them to people I see all the time, though I will be telling my housemates (for instance) personally to have a nice christmas, and in most cases I'll even mean it ;)
What's a whip-round?
A collection (of money) from everyone in the office. I'm not sure exactly what it was in aid of, whether it's going to charity or just to the office drinks pool but it's a better cause than bits of card.
A very well presented argument, my friend. Damn you.
Hello!
Points I disagree with:
As it happens, I don't send many cards, because I'm not very good at it and am young enough to not know enough people in the world to have to keep track of. And while I'm aware of the potential downsides of sending cards, that doesn't force me to assume that every card will have those downsides.
And I love receiving cards which have had effort put in to say something to me/encourage me/whatever which the sender might not want to do in conversation. And I try and do the same when I send cards to other people.
Woo, looks like I've found Robbie G!
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Tip for the future: when trying to googlebomb, make sure your link doesn't 404.
Also links are tagged with the nofollow attribute. No googlejuice for you!
ah so that's why i didn't get a single christmas card from you in the past 14 years
haha.