Where Have All the Christmas Cards Gone?

A few days ago, I received the one, the only genuinely printed Christmas card of 2009, if you don’t count the little tags that accompanied gifts and the virtual cards from family members and friends that I picked up from various Internet sites (American Greetings, Jacqui Lawson cards, etc.) and Facebook.

Did I just miss the passing of an era? Or is the old-fashioned Christmas card, whether store-bought or hand-made, the one you slip into an envelope, seal, address to the intended recipient and travel to the post office to mail, dead? Not while I’m around, I say.

I normally have my Christmas mail done by the end of November of each year to avoid the rush. Sometime in the 1990s, when there were still no corner Internet shops, I sent off 40-plus cards, each with a personal, handwritten message.

Friend Gladys Lyn Lapuz, who now designs cards with so much panache from her iPhone application, shared the information that Elizabeth Bishop, one of my favorite poets, wrote nearly 50 letters in a day while living as an expatriate in Brazil. That tidbit must have sunk deep in my subconscious when I fired off all those cards.

During the endless sorting and filing of old papers my partner and I have been doing this month, I came upon a huge bag full of Yule cards I saved over the years. These moved with me from our Santa Ana, Manila, apartment to the new house my parents built in 1975 in Pasig, then to Antipolo where I began my own married life and family, and finally to Baguio. These survivors were the ones I did not get around to pasting on the pages of my scrapbooks. A number were addressed to my parents. The salutations in some are very telling of how women were regarded in the ’60s. “Dear Dr. Lolarga and wife” is an example.

To reduce the amount of paper we’ve decided to keep, I’ve cut off the half where the greetings are printed, thrown them away, unless the sender was someone particularly special, and kept the half where the picture/design lies. I mean to recycle this “new” batch of Christmas postcards.

I may not receive the same amount of snail-mailed cards in return as in the past (the efficient email has seen to that), but I so look forward to another November of handwriting reflections on months just past, recording highs and lows in my family’s life and visiting the city post office where the lady who hands me the stamps I need smiles at me for I am to her a familiar face.

My one Christmas card of 2009 shows Chicago-based cousin Tessie Lolarga Romero, her children and grandchild.