Season's gratings

Greeting cards: When you really don't care enough

Out Thereby Todd Pitock

'Tis the season. Time to contact business associates, distant relations, and old friends with whom you no longer have anything in common. Time, in short, to pay a courtesy call on people you hope to get something from, or people you have no time for the rest of the year.

Most people will send a greeting card. Prepackaged, ineloquent, and trite, greeting cards carry a message over which you write "Dear So-and-So" and under which you sign off with your regards, warmest wishes, or, in extreme cases, love. To send a card can redeem a relationship. Not to send one can doom it: "What, he couldn't even send a card?"

It is a quick way to say that you were thinking of people, even though the actual time spent thinking of them involved writing their name on an envelope and checking them off on a list.

That cards are a fraud is one thing. That the country's 1500 greeting-card publishers have managed to brainwash us into thinking they're not is another. Last year, Americans bought 2.65 billion Christmas cards, 11 million Hanukkah cards, and 10 million New Year's cards, according to the Greeting Card Association, a trade group in Washington, DC. The average family got 28 cards, and the US Post Office sold 4.6 billion holiday stamps.

Some people find cards deeply moving. They line them up on fireplace mantels like flags representing all their friendships. "Thanks for the card," says a woman I know, wiping an eye. "It's lovely. Just lovely."

Lovely? It's what she's supposed to say. After all, you should acknowledge when someone sends you something, and "lovely" sounds like you really mean it. But the wiping of the eye? Surely she realizes it wasn't written -- that it was bought, that some doofus in a cubicle set it down from a formula and the printer arranged the lines to imitate verse. Lovely? Sure -- if she owns shares in Hallmark.

Greeting-card companies have made us think their cards are the only acceptable form of written contact, and in the process they've actually managed to create a social convention. Try simply writing your own thoughts on plain stationery and people will assume you were too cheap to buy a card. You could buy a blank card, but if you have bad handwriting, as I do, blank cards are a problem. They don't fit into printers unless you can expertly reset your software, and even then you risk breaking a different social convention against typed personal notes. The only exception to the rule against printed messages is -- you guessed it -- greeting cards.

It's a gesture, people will say. It's harmless. Maybe so, but cards intimidate people. They make folks afraid to put down their own thoughts because, as ridiculous as cards are, they are ready-made, prettily presented, and offer a back door when you don't know what to say. We live in a society of graphomaniacs, in which everyone wants to be published -- yet when it comes to a simple note, the mind's faucet won't turn. But hey, So-and-So isn't discriminating. She said the last one was lovely. Why strain to think when you can get out for a couple of bucks and a stamp?

Then again, since you don't really care about the people you're sending cards to, why take the time to write?

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Some people have caught on. They've found a cheap, quick, self-indulgent alternative: the family newsletter. These are reports recapping and assessing the year, and they usually include a wealth of detail that generally illustrates a year so humdrum that only the person who wrote it could find it interesting (or, perhaps, deeply depressing). Some people personalize their newsletters: the computer inserts a name instead of "Dear Friends." Of course, you have only to read a few lines to realize you're just one of many recipients. What gives it away is that everyone is written about in the third person. Thanks to modern technology, it is now possible to send junk mail to people you know.

The really leading-edge people have discovered electronic greeting cards. For me, there's something ironic about them. Although a computerized greeting would seem to be the ultimate in impersonal gestures, the electronic cards are actually more fun and creative than the printed ones, allowing the sender to type a personal message and then add multimedia effects, such as talking or dancing animated figures. I like them, though I am still trying to figure out how to dangle a computer from my mantel.

Other people send postcards with photos of their children. Often I've never met the adorable little creatures, but they are cute. Photos are kind to children, and even the ones who aren't cute in the flesh somehow pull it off in pictures. (In this, they tend to oppose a trend among adults.) But what do you do with the postcards once you've glanced at them? I have trouble just throwing them away. It's not just disrespectful; it's like wishing something bad on the kids, like a voodoo curse or something. So they wind up stuck to the fridge door, which begins to look like a Unicef poster, then they migrate into a pile, and then one day they're just gone. Either my dark subconscious (or perhaps my wife) takes care of the little tykes, and I feel relieved.

This time of year, greeting cards have a certain personality. As suits the end of the year, they're for old relationships. Five weeks later comes Valentine's Day, and the cards turn from green and red to cream and rose, from fake cheer to fake romance. Then comes Mother's Day, and Father's Day, births, birthdays, illnesses, deaths . . . and the wheel of the Hallmark year goes on.

Enough of this emotional plagiarism! Tell 'em how you really feel, from the heart, bad grammar and all. And if they can't take it, by golly -- then send 'em a card!

Todd Pitock, whose essays appear in Salon, Hemispheres, and the Washington Post, still gets cards from his mother. He can be reached at toddpitock@aol.com.