Fun with Holiday Cards

Our Christmas cards are finally posted in the U.S. Mail.

As I toted our little bundles of joy into the post office yesterday morning (under the icy glare of the harried Postmistress), I couldn’t help but think the entire Christmas card process—especially for those of us still writing a personal note and actually signing our names—to be an anachronistic "hold out" in a society that shuns anything with even the faint aroma of labor-intensity.

(I also couldn’t help but think that Postmistresses everywhere should be bonused on unit volume like the rest of us, but that’s a different blog post.)

In fact, for the many people who do most of their written communications from a keyboard these days, the mere act of hand-writing and addressing a hundred cards is a little bit like taking a 15-hour Organizational Behavior final exam armed with only a blue book and pen.

This year we couldn't even come up with a picture of the family that passed muster to insert into the card--maybe a relief to friends sick of seeing us pasted against some exotic backdrop--but ironic for a family that takes a thousand pictures every year. In fact, I’ve devised my own Christmas-picture-taking metric: In order to get one good picture, you need to take “half the square plus 3” of the number of people in the picture.

So, if you simply want to feature your baby in a Christmas picture, take “half of one squared plus 3,” or 4 pictures in order to get one good one.

But, as I have discovered throughout the years, if you have a family of five, it takes 15 (. . .half of 5 squared plus 3. . .and yes, round UP) attempts (and I mean in the exact same location with the exact same pose) to get one usable picture. Apparently I missed the metric this year.

More generally, I do believe, in the same way that astronomers get excited when they spot the death of a star or galaxy, that marketers and strategists can begin to get excited: The end of a century-plus paper Christmas card "life cycle" is at hand. In fact, I don’t guess that it will be a generation—maybe a decade—before it will be perfectly acceptable to Miss Manners and her peers that we email (or Facebook or Twitter or Wave) digitized cards.

And there’s nothing like a good recession to help along a secular downtrend, either. Jennifer Levitz of the WSJ reported that the incidence of the long, braggy family letter is way down in 2009.

Holiday letters, those typically peppy annual updates on family doings, are bringing tidings of a lot less joy. More hard knocks are creeping in as unemployment persists and the economy bumbles along. Laid-off holiday scribes are using the letters in their job hunts. Pink slips, the lousy housing market and tales of forsaken vacations have displaced some of the glad tidings of yesteryear.

“Some writers,” Levitz said, “are looking for support, prayers or a job offer. ‘Hi! I hope you have a wonderful holiday,’ writes Bill Mayhew, a laid-off software manager in Natick, Mass. ‘If there was ever, in our lifetimes, a year when we need a little Christmas, this is surely it....Please keep me in mind if you know of a Boston-area organization that can use entrepreneurial, business management, or technology management skills.’"

Judy Keen of USA Today reported on an even more troubling trend for paper cards.

“The U.S. Postal Service says there was an 11% decline in cancellations of first-class cards and letters from Dec. 1-13 — when most Americans mail holiday cards — compared to 2008. . . [while] Hallmark spokeswoman Deidre Mize says about 1.8 billion Christmas cards will be sent this year, down from 1.9 billion to 2 billion in recent years.”

Of course, you wouldn’t expect a great company like Hallmark (see my Shoebox post here) to sit by idly while their core product is being cannibalized. “A popular Hallmark service addresses, stamps and mails cards customers design online, says product manager Maureen Dilger. New this year on Hallmark's website: holiday postcards that cost 28 cents to mail.”

This is, to my mind, a transitional product—a balm to the conscience of those who want to go digital but fear the Ghost-of-Christmas-Past (in the form of their mothers and grandmothers) rising up to smite them. It is also a way for Hallmark to stay in the paper game, just as Day-Timer and Rolodex and other great brands have done, while they figure out ways to replace paper revenue in the digital world.

As for the Ghost-of-Christmas-Future, my friend, it will be upon you in no time at all: Click here for this year’s digitized Christmas card from the Schultz Family. Click on the Eric icon for a traditional, over-the-top-and-insufferable, often-ficticious letter (in the style of Cormac McCarthy) about our fabulous year. (See the sidebar for a blast of nostalgia: Eric's straight-A, third-grade report card from 1965!) Click on the Susan icon for a more balanced and truthful Christmas message. Click here if you’d like one of their children to deliver the news in front of the Yule log, here if you'd like them to deliver the news from a beach in Bermuda, and here for “Cosette the dancing cat” to deliver the news of their year set to a rap version of “Deck the Halls.”

Avatar Schmavatar. We're talking about holiday cards with drop-dead digital production.

Can you wait? You’ll waste months watching digitized Christmas messages from your friends, pass them all over the web, rate them, archive them and sample the Google Christmas Card Hall of Fame on a regular basis. You'll download the latest iPhone Card-on-the-Fly app. In a few short years you will come to believe that the idea of a paper card with a Kodak picture and a hand-written note sent via the U.S. Mail was like, well, a black phone tethered to the wall by a cord--a phone that didn’t surf the Web or beep with texts or tempt you with email all day. A phone that didn't fit in your pocket.

Sigh.

Yep. I kind of miss those, too.

(P.S.--Merry Christmas & happy holidays to all!)

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations