Why are people not sending out Christmas cards anymore?

My guess is the computer Facebook, or even the phone. I received a Christmas card from my grandma just yesterday though. Doesn’t matter if it was one card, five or fifty-twelve, I was very happy to get it. It’s on my kitchen table right now.

Symbeline, good for you. i think you are right. its funny how just card, from that one special person, can lighten up your whole day. your grandma loves you and it shows. good for both of you.

People just don’t appreciate our secular non holiday winter cards, really what am I supposed to say….hey its snowing out, here’s a picture of my kid, cute huh? Give her stuff! LOL

@deliasdancemom I love your cynicism. :D Christmas needs more of it.

Hehe, thanks….its a dominating force of my personality

I think it’s similar to writing letters, it’s slowly being replaced by technology. I still receive quite a few Christmas cards though, but I also send out quite a few of them. I sent out 80 of them on December 2nd and still have a few more I need to send out. So far, I’ve gotten 8 this year. I love picking out our cards each year, writing personal notes in each one, and mailing them out.

Whether you send them by carrier pigeons, the mail or the computer, who really cares, as long as the thought is there.

@Symbeline It is the thought that counts. I like to have a card in hand rather than on my computer because I tend to keep a lot of the cards I get, especially ones with family pictures on them. Emailed cards that get sent to everyone in your address book at the same time just don’t seem as personal to me as individual ones mailed to each person.

I’m not disagreeing or agreeing. To each his own of course. And I understand your point. Just to me personally, it doesn’t matter much how it comes, as long as it does.
Hate to be corny, but eh. XD

I still send a lot of cards—between 70 and 80—and receive quite a few, especially from relatives of my generation and older. But I am a retro die-hard in some ways and won’t give up my old customs even if I am the last to follow them. I agree with the observation that the number of incoming cards has fallen off sharply in recent years.

I attribute this change directly to the Internet, and not so much because people are using it to send greetings as because I think our use of the Internet has deflated the quality and character of Christmas to the point that we just can’t get as enthusiastic about it any more. One of these years, and I imagine it will be sooner rather than later, Christmas will—for all but the truly religious—devolve into a holiday for kids, like Halloween.

Commercialization has already done a job on the holiday but couldn’t kill it. I think our insatiable appetite for making things easy will do it. It’s all mechanical now and lacking in spirit. And in that case, why do it at all?

If you doubt that, at least in the U.S., ease has become a value that trumps nearly everything else, look at advertising. Advertising takes the pulse of the nation. Advertisers must absolutely know what people will respond to, or they don’t survive. Look at how many products promote easiness as a selling point, packaging feature, benefit of using the product, etc., etc. Advertisements, commercials, and package designs find all kinds of ways to tell you how easy your life will be with this item. We are positively saturated to the point of sickness with the notion that easy = good and good = easy. No wonder kids want to cheat in school.

And so—if we focus our Christmas energies on what is easiest, we send mass mailings of greetings by e-mail, order gifts we never physically touch for people we seldom see, and give up all the effort and commitment that used to make holiday shopping meaningful. Soon enough we will lose interest in this vestige of a once-significant, once-personal, once-fulfilling observance and just let it go.

Oh, maybe because greeting cards are just a bunch of dead trees that could be used for something puposeful or enduring instead of something so fleeting and superficial.

I loathe greeting cards. What a waste. Instead, write me a note or tell me how you feel about me face-to-face.

I’ve only received one Christmas card in my life, I think? But my grandmother likes to buy cards and leave them in various places of the house just because she likes to remember how it was some years ago when she used to receive dozens of Christmas cards every year. However, my mom never does that, and she also never sent any cards. That’s probably why I don’t. And the reason why most people don’t do it anymore is probably that they use their phones and the internet in order to say “Hey merry Christmas!” so they don’t need to send cards.

I used to send hundreds of cards a year, right after Thanksgiving and I would handwrite something particular in each of them. I think stamps cost .08 cents then and a box of 20 cards was under $5.00. Stamps are something near .50 cents now, right? And cards? I don’t even look anymore.

The programming about killing trees for paper, furthering consumerism for a commonly non religious holiday time and the replacing of cards being sent in lieu of the “family e-mail/newsletters” complete with pictures took the shine off of it for me.

Facebook can be seen as the devil OR it can be fun to share a quick video or picture montage on a family or friends page, all for the price of your monthly internet subscription and only the people in your group who want to have to click on them. I offend no one with my choice of pricey cards or hand scrawl. No one has to look at my card and ask, “oh my gawd, I hardly hear from her so why did she spend the money to send this thing?!”