August is a slow month, though not as slow as March. June is uber-busy, as is September.
If you think I’m talking about a teaching schedule, you would be incorrect. Rather, this is how I view the months via the greeting cards we need to buy.
Do you remember how excited you’d be when you were young and it was almost your birthday? You knew the mailbox would have envelopes with your name on them, something which didn’t happen often. There would be envelopes of different colors than the normal plain white. And there might even be a few bucks inside the card that you hastily read, hoping for that cash prize in the middle.
I don’t get the same number of cards on my birthday, and that’s okay. I don’t expect cards from my aunts and uncles in my 40s. But I wonder if greeting cards are not used as much in our digital age.
One of the first things I do each morning when I log on to Facebook is see who has a birthday that day and go post on their wall. (Of course, this is my chance, as an English teacher, to remind you that such greetings, if they include the name of the person, should also have a comma before that name. For example: Happy birthday, Mark!)
This is an easy way out. It seems to me we’ve had something like this for some time. There used to be a website, and maybe there still is, where you could use templates to design a birthday greeting to someone and send it to their email. Once that happened, I think fewer people headed to Hallmark.
But Michelle and I still enjoy sending cards to people in the mail. This is not just for birthdays, but anniversaries too. There are a lot of cards to choose from when I swing by Walmart or Target! Sometimes I’ll find just the right card quickly, but other times, I will read through ten cards before finding the best for that person or couple.
At times, I’ll look over the calendar for the month and buy every card we’ll need in one trip. Other times, I’ll go week to week. Where I run into problems is months like January, where we have a birthday shortly into the month. Plus, it’s a new year, so it’s not as if the new calendar is up to look upon.
When you look back at the months I put as busy or not as much, June would make sense to most people. A lot of weddings happen in June, so hunting for cards for anniversaries takes up almost half of our June cards. But both my parents also have birthdays in June; they actually got married on Dad’s birthday, so he gets double cards! Sprinkle in some other birthdays and it’s a lot of June cards!
When I buy graduation cards, I buy them in bulk. I can write an individual message inside if I want. I think there should be sympathy cards in bulk as well. Those aren’t fun to pick out, for obvious reasons, but also because sometimes I’m not sure how religious I should make it.
And for birthdays and anniversaries, I try to make sure they fit the personality and humor of the person or couple. I’m not just grabbing some random card. Cards for our niece and nephews have changed over the years, but it is always fun when they’re young and you can find a card with a Marvel character or princess they like. But I have to measure their maturity as they enter the teen years and adulthood on how risque I can have the card be.
Admit it, you still get a tingle of excitement when you see one of those larger envelopes in the mail. It sure beats the junk mail and bills. Even if there isn’t money inside (and goodness knows, there are plenty of cards to buy that highlight the fact that you’ve included nothing inside!), it’s a warm feeling when you see a signature on the bottom. That person took some extra time, and money, to pick out a card for you and mail it off.
I’m not sure what a stamp costs anymore (I think they just went up in price again), but even if you have a generic card and dash off a quick note, you might make someone’s day. Sure, you can just send a Facebook message or shoot off a text, but then that person has nothing to set on their mantle or hutch at home! If you haven’t done so for a while, think about caring enough to send the very best!
Word of the Week: This week’s word is bedizen, which means to decorate or dress up with more ostentation than taste, as in, “The little girl chose to bedizen the card for Mother’s Day, adding frills and lace with glue.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!