My grandmother hand-wrote 200 cards every December. Now I get a mass email that says “Happy Holidays” and a link to someone’s Instagram.
This morning I opened my mailbox—actual mailbox, the physical one—and found exactly three Christmas cards. Three. Moreover, one was from my dentist, one was from my insurance agent, and one was from my ex-husband’s new wife, which I assume was meant as some kind of psychological warfare. The Christmas cards meaning something era is officially over.
Whatever happened to tradition? Whatever happened to effort? Whatever happened to my wine? Oh, there it is.
When Christmas Cards Had Meaning
When I was growing up, my grandmother sat at her dining room table every December with a fountain pen and a stack of monogrammed stationery. She wrote personal messages to everyone. Receiving her card felt like receiving a gift. The Christmas cards meaning was clear: you mattered enough for someone to spend fifteen minutes thinking about you specifically.
Now people send mass emails with subject lines like “Season’s Greetings from the Hendersons!” and a PDF attachment of their family skiing. I don’t want a PDF. I don’t want to see your children in helmets. I want a card I can display on my mantel, not delete from my spam folder.
The Digital Decline Of Everything
As I wrote about recipe changes ruining my childhood, this is part of a larger pattern. We’ve traded quality for convenience at every turn. Therefore, we’ve ended up with a culture where texting “merry xmas” at 11:47 PM on December 24th counts as adequate. It’s not adequate. It’s lazy. Furthermore, it’s lowercase, which is basically a war crime against the English language.
My daughter—who calls me “Ashleigh” now, but that’s another column—sent me a text message last year that just said “hbd” for my birthday. Happy Birthday, abbreviated. Reduced. Minimized. Much like my role in her life, apparently.
What We’ve Lost
Christmas cards meaning has evaporated because effort has become optional. Penmanship is dead. Stamp-licking is dead. Standing in line at the post office, complaining about the wait, then feeling accomplished when you finally mail everything—dead. Instead, we have Canva templates and “digital cards” that are just JPEGs pretending to be sentiments.
My grandmother is gone now. But I still have every card she ever sent me, tied with a ribbon in a box I’ll never throw away. Meanwhile, my inbox auto-deletes promotional emails after 30 days, taking the Hendersons’ ski trip PDF with it.
Good riddance to the PDF. But I’ll pour another glass for what we’ve lost. It’s almost noon anyway.
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