Every year, when I check my unused holiday card inventory, I open up the old Apple MacBook box I use to store the best cards I’ve received and read through a few of the lovely notes people have sent. I admire the artwork of those cards—some beautiful, some witty, some handmade with care.
I don’t have a similar keepsake spot on my phone for the emoji-filled texts I receive on our shared holidays. I appreciate them, but in my personal etiquette handbook, the text replaces the phone calls we used to make all day on Christmas (or your winter holiday of choice). They don’t replace the mail.
I still send physical holiday cards.
I also try to keep up with birthday cards, anniversaries, and the occasional “just because” letter or postcard. I like the process of taking the time to find the right words to tell someone I was thinking of them, not merely because I got a notification on my phone or opened a social media app. I thought about them in advance. I went to a gift shop or paper store and saw something that made me think of you. I bought stamps. I sat down at a table or desk with a pen in hand and stopped to come up with something meaningful to say to you. I licked an envelope and sealed it. I used my address stamp. I walked to a mailbox and dropped it in.
We live in a time when we are the center of everything. Put your headphones on, pull that pocket-sized supercomputer up a few inches away from your face, and let it bring your algorithmically personalized world directly to you.
In the moments when I stop to send out a letter, I am not the center of my universe. The recipient is.
We had a lovely team holiday party today, including a White Elephant gift exchange and a poem-based game that a colleague wrote herself—no ChatGPT. It was delightful. Phones were face down. Eyes were on each other. Gratitude for our time together and our shared accomplishments wasn’t in Slack emotes or GIF boards; it was in the room where we shared reality for about 90 minutes.
It made me nostalgic for the pre-pandemic office card ritual. I miss taking two minutes out of a workday to write a Happy Birthday greeting to a co-worker and then passing it along to the next person who hadn’t signed. There’s friction and intention in these small acts, and that effort is meaningful to both the writer and the person being honored.
Maybe I’m a dinosaur, but with rare exception, I’d prefer that to something typed out in the brief moment when a notification pulled you away from doomscrolling.
Thank you, but I receive those messages as: I was too caught up in my own shit to do anything ahead of time, so here, have some emojis.
That’s how I feel when I send a DM instead of putting pen to paper as well.
A card says, You were alive in my mind, and I didn’t need a device to put you there.
This was handled with care.
No AI involved.