Why I Don’t Send Out Christmas Cards

It’s Christmastime, which means that it’s time to be sending out a slew of Christmas cards to all my friends and relations and . . . wait. I never do that. I do a family newsletter for a select few individuals, but other than that, I send out pretty much nothing. And each year, a part of me feels guilty. I enjoy getting other people’s cards–perhaps it’s hypocritical of me to not be sending the same in return. And no one likes to feel hypocritical, do they?

But I’m not going to send out cards this year, and I very much doubt I’ll do it in the future. Why not?

Because I’ve got this thing called a “blog” I update 5 days a week. Anyone who wants to know what I’m up to in my life has every opportunity to find out all that and more–at any time they want to. So why in the world would I send out cards, something which would just add to the overall “List o’ Crap Bryce Has to Do”?

I get it. Christmas/Holiday cards are nice. It gives you a chance to reconnect with people you hardly hear from at all anymore. But then again, isn’t that kind of what Facebook is all about? It’s true I have a very limited number of friends who are Facebook holdouts, and it’s nice to get a reminder from them once a year that they haven’t actually dropped off the face of the planet, but I’m not about to institute a Christmas card giving tradition just to sate the desire for some distant friends to be able to get a brief update about me delivered to their mailbox one day instead of their inbox.

I’ve been blogging daily for a long time now–at least, it feels like a long time to me. Something like six years. This is my 1,616th entry. And the quality of the blogging has steadily risen over the years, I’d like to think. Readership isn’t exactly through the roof, but that’s risen, too. I feel confident that anyone who wants to find out about me, can. (Probably find out far too much about me, really. But I try to keep the paranoia at a minimum.)

Still, I do my best to be an open-minded chap, and I realize that my Scrooginess might not make sense to some. I mean, I see some friends sending me cards each year who also do a great job keeping Facebook or blogs up to date. Surely they’ve thought of some good reasons for doing it. So let me put the question out to you, the general public: have blogs and Facebook (properly used) eliminated the need for Christmas cards? Why do you keep sending them? Inquiring minds want to know . . .