GAYS MILLS - Tis the season when we look especially forward to getting the mail each day. In the mailbox just about every morning, there are greetings in the form of Christmas cards from near and far, from businesses we patronize, friends, co-workers, and shirt-tail or closer relatives. Send and ye shall receive, so goes the altered quote, and common sense. Don’t send and you may still get cards, maybe not enough to decorate all the way around a door frame with, but a few cards nevertheless.

We get cards from early December into the first half of January. I am impressed with those early senders - they really have their acts together. And I sympathize with and understand the late card senders. Sending cards is a chore-habit-ritual, etc. that comes at a peak busy time for all.

You can practically hear the sighs of relief from mail carriers as the card and gift package sending season ends. I wonder if the US Postal Service considers Christmas as their month-long ‘Black Friday,’ the day when many retail businesses claim that they finally get into the black (ink) for the year. The postal service is struggling as our communication methods have evolved and expanded.  We can now instantly wish someone a Merry Christmas on many formats and devices. But getting an actual card is still a treat and apparently sending holiday greetings is a fairly strong and entrenched tradition.

To make a very rough segue here, what if there were other occasions for card sending? The old standbys of birthdays, of course, anniversaries, for sure, graduations and retirements, oh yeah are all card-friendly. But how about the Solstices and Equinoxes–that’s four cards a year right there. And there’s Arbor Day, that could be a biggie. The 4th of July is just begging for greeting cards. I’m sure card makers are racking their creative minds trying to come up with ever more occasion-appropriate opportunities to sell cards.  Hallmark, if you’re listening….

I stumbled onto some suggestions along that line recently. I have a book entitled ‘Thank You For The Giant Sea Tortoise.’ The book lists results of some New York Magazine competitions. Here are some of the entries in one of the contests: the one to suggest “unseemly greeting cards for unlikely occasions.“ The title of the book itself was one entry in that contest, and good enough to become the name of the book.

“Watched Your Smoke!  Now You’re Pope!  Congrats!”

“Congratulations on Becoming a Spy!”

“Sory I Havent Ritten Lately--I Hait Riting”

“Sorry to Hear About Your Allergy to Paper Products”

“Congratulations on Having Your Charge Reduced to Simple Assault”

“Thinking of You as You Picket”

“Good Luck With Your New Boomerang: Many Happy Returns!”

“Hats Off to Your New Hairpiece!”

“The Gang at the Office Will Miss You, Except for the Business Manager”

“Congratulations on Your Oscar for Best Cinematographer in a Feature-Length, Black-and-White, Foreign-Language, American-Made Documentary”

“Hope Your Recent Illness Was a Pleasant One”