Front Porch: Mailed cards treasured holiday gift

I am now busy sending out Christmas cards. Dozens and dozens of them.

To be at peace with all sensitivities, I should state that they are holiday cards. I try to choose carefully which cards I send to whom. The more religious Christian friends and relatives might receive cards depicting a manger or angels, with appropriate message. Agnostics definitely receive religion-free greetings. Jewish and non-Christian recipients get cards that (hopefully) are respectful and appropriate.

The point is to send end-of-the-year greetings, celebrate the season and acknowledge the spiritual importance of this time for those to whom that is significant. I like doing this and have written before about the joy it brings me. But alas, it is a dying tradition. While there are time issues and money issues driving this trend away from mailed correspondence in general, I do have to utter a big sigh and press on – handwriting the addresses, jotting little notes on the corner of the cards and pressing those pricey-but-pretty holiday stamps in the upper right hand corner of the envelopes.

The sending of Christmas cards officially began in London in 1843 when Sir Henry Cole, a civil servant, came up with the idea in an effort to see how the new “public post office” could be used by ordinary people. He had his friend John Horsley, an artist, design the first card, a three-panel affair portraying people caring for the poor on the outer two panels and a family enjoying a big Christmas dinner in the center panel.

The first Christmas cards appeared in America in the late 1840s, but most people couldn’t afford to send them. In 1875 printer immigrant Louis Prang, who had worked on early cards in England, started mass producing cards in America, most with images from nature. He was printing 5 million cards by 1881.

What’s interesting about the cards themselves is how they’ve evolved as society has changed. In the 1950s, there were new scenes of abstract art, autos and televisions. The ’60s brought psychedelic colors and peace symbols. Nostalgic themes arose in the 1970s; the 1980s brought more sophisticated images. High-tech defined the 1990s, and the 21st century shows a pretty clear division between the religious holiday and secular images of this time of year – though expressed messages focus on peace and harmony in both camps.

These cards are a history of us, and I still celebrate them … and us. Sure, they’re awfully time-consuming to deal with at surely the busiest time of year and because we mostly don’t make the time to do such old fashioned things in general any more. And it would certainly be cheaper to fire off a group email and be done with it. But an electronic missive just doesn’t feel right as the year winds to a close.

I must confess that I also do that thing that is most always dreaded when it’s abused – I enclose a group Christmas letter along with the handwritten note on the card. I limit it to fewer than 200 words, and it’s mostly pictures. It seems like a big burst of vanity, and maybe it is, but since I didn’t grow up in this neck of the woods, I have a bunch of friends and relatives on the East Coast who I don’t get to see that often – and this is how we get to “see” each other.

I should point out that a good number of those to whom cards are sent are not Tweeters or Facebookers, and my elderly relatives most certainly aren’t even emailers. We have all kept up with one another’s lives with mailed pictures and little notes over many decades now. It’s a nice and comforting little habit.

What I enjoy about this process is that it gives me the opportunity to reflect on the year that is coming to an end – not just to think about the events, but concisely note highlights I think would be of interest to family and friends, and in so doing I get to relive them again.

I know too that my even-older-than-me relatives still enjoy getting what they call real mail – those envelopes that come to the house, get opened and read leisurely from a comfy chair. They then put the card up on the mantle, where it becomes part of the holiday decoration. And it gets looked at again and again. My Aunt Mary, who is in her 90s and who no longer writes notes herself, told me on the phone recently that she still looks forward to receiving her annual niece Stefanie card.

So I’ll keep mailing out those Christmas/Hanukkah/holiday/season’s greeting cards. When my generation dies out, it may not matter any more.

But right now it does.