Posted on 12/23/2012 7:40:12 AM PST by JoeProBono
Every year around the holidays, countless Americans sit down at their dining room tables to thoughtfully scribble pen-and-paper updates about how they are and what they've been doing with their lives to a select number of friends. These messages are usually written on the back of a recent family photograph (sometimes with Santa hats), before they're sealed, stamped, and mailed around the country, where they're displayed like a trophy over someone else's fireplace.
Could that all be changing? This year, especially, there seems to be a dearth of dead-tree holiday cheer filling up mailboxes across the country. In a recent column for TIME, author Nina Burleigh says the spirit once distilled inside the Christmas card is dying, and a familiar, if fairly obvious perpetrator killed it: The internet. "There's little point to writing a Christmas update now, with boasts about grades and athletic prowess, hospitalizations and holidays, and the dog's mishaps, when we have already posted these events and so much more of our minutiae all year long," she writes. "The urge to share has already been well sated."
[Now] we already have real-time windows into the lives of people thousands of miles away. We already know exactly how they've fared in the past year, much more than could possibly be conveyed by any single Christmas card. If a child or grandchild has been born to a former colleague or high school chum living across the continent, not only did I see it within hours on Shutterfly or Instagram or Facebook, I might have seen him or her take his or her first steps on YouTube. If a job was gotten or lost, a marriage made or ended, we have already witnessed the woe and joy of it on Facebook, email and Twitter.
Burleigh says the demise of the Christmas card is deeply saddening. "It portends the end of the U.S. Postal Service," she writes. "It signals the day is near when writing on paper is non-existent." It's true, says Tony Seifart at Memeburn — "my mantel is empty this year. In fact I haven't received one Christmas card yet.".......
WE received far fewer this year than last year. WE sent out fifteen. In short, I agree the Christmas card custom seems to be dying.
Is the Christmas card dead? Not with me it isn’t. Of course I usually hand deliver mine so no revenue for USPS.
“... our 7 year old Lexus is still great”.
Mrs. Grampa Dave has a wonderful sense of humor!!!
She has a great sense of humor and even though I manage our IRAS and her 401K, and pay the monthly bills, she is a great believer in not buying something new when what we owns works and maybe better.
We own one tv in the family room and it is a 25 year old RCA 25 inch with a great picture and suprisingly good sound. We had two Comcast guys tell us it was one of the best pictures they knew of and gave us a card with their home # if we ever wanted to sell it.
She has been a Talbot lady for decades and had some clothes that she was a little large for. She had an operation, loss some weight and has recycled those clothes and had the larger ones altered. I offered to buy new ones, and she said why. I did buy some Talbott’s stuff for this Christmas. On that shopping trip, she had a 25+ year old Talbott jacket and was asked where she had bought it by a young sales lady. Her reply at a Talbott’s before you were born dear.
Don’t send them. Never have.
The only Christmas cards I received were from politicians. The only Christmas cards I sent were to the 22 National Guardsmen and active duty military from my County.
Although we don't send Christmas cards in the volume we once did, folks in my family (with the exception of my baby sister) have never done more than sign the card with their name and a brief personal 'wishing you well', etc.
I thought my baby sister was the only person in the world who took the time to compose a complete review of her family's fortunes over the prior year. I should have known better. She's such a creature of the status quo.
LOL!!!!
Very much appreciate your post. If you get a chance, please pass along my wishing them well and God’s blessing. Thanks.
“She has been a Talbot lady for decades...”
Ahh... good taste as well. Talbot rarely goes out of style. Buy pretty, conservative clothing and you can look great for years and years. I am glad she had the larger ones altered.. why give away good clothes that you love? A new scarf or a new pin.. you have a brand new outfit. You guys are great!
I have a cousin whose wife types out a page and a half or two page letter telling everyone what went on in their lives the past year. She is a retired teacher and both are flaming liberals. They adopted a daughter about 20 years ago and a son a few years later.
The daughter has had four kids by three different sperm donors and my cousin and wife adopted the two oldest just after they retired. She has also been in juvenile detention on several occasions.
Imagine being 60 - 62 and have two rug rats in diapers. We feel sorry for them, but they were awful parents when their daughter and son were in grade - high school. They admit the daughter walked in on them "doing it" in the kitchen one morning. Now they wonder why she spreads her legs at the drop of a hat.
After January 1, I am going to enroll as a lifetime member of the NRA. Nevertheless, I think this photo is bizarre.
After January 1, I am going to enroll as a lifetime member of the NRA. Nevertheless, I think this photo is bizarre.
Same here. Check my post just above.
When the White House had class and not an a$$.
You’ve been reading too much government propaganda.
The U.S. first class postage rate for the first ounce was 2 cents for Christmas 1931. The same postage for Christmas 2013 is to be 46 cents, which is 23 times the 1931 postage rate.
The Christmas turkey in 1931 was typically 39 cents per pound. If the 2013 price for Christmas turkey also increased 23 times, the price for the Christmas turkey would be $8.97 per pound, not the actual 49 cents to $1.23 per pound we are actually seeing in supermarkets for Christmas 2012.
Gasoline per gallon has increased about 23 times since 1931, but a good fraction of the increase is due to government taxes on gasoline.
The cost of a Vector Graphics microcomputer with two 8 inch floppy disk drives 92 kilobytes of storage each, 56 kilobytes of RAM, 80 character per line monochrome Crt monitor, and an NEC Spinwriter or a Diablo daisywheel printer was about $12,000 Christmas 1980. Only two years earlier a 16 kilobyte static RAM daughterboard was depp discount priced at #1,999.00 for the holiday season. Today....
I can’t tell you the entire history of the US Stamp price but since the 70s its kept in line with inflation.
Also the price of computers doesn’t have much to do with inflation so much as the technology used to make computers became cheaper, so not sure why you added that.
Historical first class postage rates since 1863 are readily available with Internet search engines. Just search for “historical first class postage”.
The price of computers has everything to do with the inflation of postage rates. A family member and retired USPS letter carrier often observes how The USPS has been ruined by gross mismanagement to the point where the workplace is hostile and incapablee of adapting to customer needs. I recall how I was appalled by the wasteful spending on computer automation thirty years ago, when the USPS spent insane amounts of money repairing computer controlled sorting machines which were inherently doomed to constantly malfunction. Relatives and friends report conditons have not improved. It has gotten to the point where the Post office cannot and will not sort and deeliver mail to the correct address in its own small town. Now they want to decrease revenue even further by eliminating Saturday deliveries, rather than increase revenue with 7 day deliveries. A century ago the Post Office was picking up and delivering mail up to six times per day in New York City. Now they can’t move it a thousand yards in the same town in three days. Then they wonder why they are losing business like crazy.
With the cost of computing and e-mailing decreasing 23 fold while postage increases 23 fold despite computer automation at the post office, computers and their proper usage versus misuse becomes a critical factor.
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