Let’s discuss for a moment the age of advanced technology in which we live. 

It is a time when a person (me!) can blurt thoughts out into a keyboard, press a button and have them displayed for (literally) all the world to see.  Pictures can be taken with a telephone and then shared instantly with family and friends around the globe.  Most revolutionary, though, is the way we communicate with one another – almost every written word I receive is via e-mail.  I seriously don’t know the last time I received a letter from someone through the mail.

Isn’t it amazing, then, that the tradition of Christmas cards is still alive and well and causing back strain to postal service employees everywhere?  Think about it.  For all of the ways traditional “snail mail” has been replaced (paying bills online; store websites instead of catalogs; and even the use of e-cards for birthdays and greetings), I don’t know of any of my family or friends who have stopped sending Christmas cards through the mail in favor of a more modern manner of holiday greeting. 

I love receiving Christmas cards.  My favorites are the photo cards of my friends’ kids so I can track their growth from year to year.  I confess that  I never throw these cards away and have a shoebox full of photo cards upstairs.  I like the funny, cartoonish cards, the serious, religious cards and especially the cards that look like a scene out of Currier & Ives. 

I love cards with glittery snow.  Actually, I just like glitter of any kind.

My Christmas wish, then, is that regardless of the advances we make in technology and communication, please leave my Christmas cards alone.  I want to continue to open my mailbox each year to find a batch highly inefficient cards with overpriced stamps waiting for me to display them in all of their low-tech glory.