I’ve invested more than a day of time in getting Happy New Year cards designed, printed, addressed, and mailed. It will also cost about $400 paid to Shutterfly and the USPS. Part of the time and effort is inquiring about the current home addresses of friends who have moved (a task that serves no purpose except to enable me to mail them cards). In the old days this was a great opportunity to reconnect with distant friends and relatives. It occurs to me that today nearly all of our friends and relatives learn about our lives on a continuous basis through Facebook. Does that mean that the custom of sending hardcopy holiday cards with family photos and news will wither away and die? The young people that I know don’t seem to have mailing addresses in their smartphones so I’m not sure if they would have any way of sending hardcopy holiday cards even if they wanted to.
17 thoughts on “When will hardcopy holiday cards become obsolete?”
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Hi Phil,
I think it’s a sign of fairly advanced old age that you’re still trying.
I’m British – very much not the most forward-looking and tradition-slaying of societies – and the custom of cards at Christmas is dying out even among older people.
Facebook and email, as you say, is what is killing it. Perhaps a bit of it is the rapidly-rising cost of postage, too.
Cheers
Many of the people you know and care about may not be part of the very small group of people with whom we seem to be able to interact on a daily basis. I love to get that yearly card from far away friends who I don’t see often but are part of my life history. I also spend a few hundred dollars on Shutterfly and stamps.
Thanks for your blog that I enjoy so much. Feliz y prospero 2015!
There are fewer old friends to send cards to as one becomes older.
You must have hundreds of cards printed to tally up $400. I had a couple hundred printed at Costco (on photo paper, so they don’t really look like greeting cards, but at $16/200, it would be churlish to complain). On other services like Moo.com or PSPrint, real greeting cards come to about $1-$1.50 each with envelopes.
The big advantage is, we don’t have to expose our daughter’s photo on Zuck’s privacy-mangling machine. Designing a greeting card is also a fun project. Addressing, stamping and handwriting them – not so much, as you rightly point out.
Fazal: Why spend even 8 cents each (the Costco price) when my HP laserprinter can do the job for 1.7 cents/page? A black-and-white laser print would be considered a beautiful object by some cultures.
I was under the impression that Facebook was more of a worker-bee, blue collar vanity site. We do not participate and our area’s richer families decidedly remain absent from any sort of Facebook profile, so maybe it is fair to say Facebookers are not the be all and end all for determining if sending real, live Christmas cards is out of touch.
In my opinion, I’d say it’s actually vice versa.
Hey Phil, there’s a project: see what income class of Americans participates in/on? Facebook.
Recently a 20-something relative was perplexed why I was planning to mail change of address cards. “Why don’t you just use Facebook?” “Oh, you Millennials…” But if I’m honest with myself I think I received only 1 piece of mail from friends and family in 2014. Even wedding invitations have been electronic.
Well, since you only see about 15% of what your friends post on FB, there is an argument that you really aren’t as connected to all those old friends as you may think. I sent out cards this year, for the first time in about 10 years. It was sort of a spur of the moment thing when I got an email from VistaPrint offering 70% as a Black Friday special.
Remember: Thanks for the project idea, but I think it has already been done, if only so that Facebook can market itself better to advertisers. http://www.businessinsider.com/2014-social-media-demographics-update-2014-9 shows that Facebook membership drops off somewhat with higher income, but it also drops off with age and a 50-year-old will tend to earn more than an 18-year-old.
http://www.cnet.com/news/social-network-for-rich-people-costs-9000-to-join/ is about a social network for self-identified rich people. I am not hopeful regarding this startup due to the fact that my rich friends (all self-made) don’t like to pay for stuff that they can get for free.
Anecdotally, adjusted for age I haven’t noticed a difference in the tendency of my rich versus non-rich friends to be on Facebook (my richest Facebook friends are worth hundreds of millions of dollars; I don’t think I am “friends” with any billionaires).
I think most people prefer a card that they can hold in their hands to any Facebook-like “update/notification.” Electronic watches are far superior to mechanical ones, nevertheless many people still buy Rolexes. About Skype dinners with friends? Avoids the restaurant bill, the taxi ride…
As a personal data point, I am 45 years old. My mother was a big fan of holiday cards, and I never got the point even before electronic communication. In the case of friends that drifted away, either life has you cross paths with them again, in which case you get back together, or it doesn’t, in which case annual holiday cards won’t save the friendship. So the whole thing seemed pointless to me.
With my younger friends, when they drift away, i never have their address, though I may have their email and/ or facebook page for awhile. In most cases, if I really needed to find someone I could, though it might take some detective work.
I still send cards. In the past I sent regular cards, with a short note in each; no long letter, no photo. I then switched to photo cards with a note, and now send a photo card with a sentence or so. On the receiving end, I never much read the long letters I received and didn’t like the photo cards. After having kids, the photo cards from other families make me smile. I like seeing the kids grow up. Obviously, things change.
I think the concept of a yearly connection, (with photos for me please) is still a good idea. Electronic would be OK for me, but it feels so much like SPAM, I’m not sure I will switch soon. A Facebook or other social media connection for close friends works, but further out in the network, it would be just too hard to dig to find the “one big thing from last year” for each person.
I can’t tell if that makes me old, lazy or indifferent.
I only get one holiday card from a peer my age (32). All the other cards I receive are from people in there late 50’s and older. I would argue that hardcopy holiday cards are already obsolete.
Dear Phil,
I would guess the number of Facebook users that are among the wealthiest top five percent would be extremely small.
The true rich folk don’t have to have a free online profile to talk aka brag about all of their homes, cars, trips, etc. They simply don’t find it useful or necessary. The wannabes, on the other hand, are all over it.
Ironically, Phil, about ninty percent of Facebook reminds me of the long, boring hard copy Christmas letters that are sent out at Christmas.
Imagine that, Mark Zuckerberg did all that work just to create what anyone else could already do with a piece of paper and 49 cents.
PS
I doubt any of the Koch brothers or their immediate families are on Facebook.
Edit
Very sorry for going off topic, but let’s define Facebook:
A place to post photos of yourself and possibly your family photos and then every other imaginable thing under the sun. Also, it’s a place to update friends about yourself, possibly your family and everything else imaginable under the sun.
And based on my limited experience, unless machinations are undertaken to make oneself “private”, the bulk of the stuff described above is available to anything under the sun with a Facebook account.
No thanks.
In my opinion it’s second cousin to having my personal stuff running 24-7 on a nearby electronic highway billboard.
PS
Sorry for the repeat post, but just a note to Phil re his earlier post about the social network for rich people: it’s already closed.
Over the past five years or so, I’ve received and sent fewer and fewer Christmas and holiday cards, but plan to continue to send out about a dozen to my long-time friends and relatives.
I’ve increasingly turned to email and text to send holiday greetings. In fact, ten minutes ago, I sent out a mass “Happy New Year” text message to forty friends and relatives. I guess that’s the lazy man’s way to do it, though I’m now receiving incessant text message replies.
I only use Facebook, under a pseudonym, to meet women.