A Holiday Card With Bite

Unwilling to get lost in the shuffle, members of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation braved Monday’s blistering cold and personally delivered their holiday card for Mayor Bloomberg to City Hall. At first blush, the 8-foot-by-5-foot card looked friendly enough. What’s not to like about a big red ribbon looped over a flurry of Magic Marker scribbling?Upon closer inspection, however, the card revealed itself to be less a bearer of good tidings than a cranky instrument of agitation.Block letters spelled out, “ALL WE WANT FOR THE HOLIDAYS IS TO SAVE OUR NEIGHBORHOOD,” pressing the group’s concern that the West Village’s landmark protections be extended to the waterfront blocks, which otherwise, it is feared, will soon be overrun by glass-and-steel towers.Surrounding the main message were smaller notes from Village residents. “Don’t let the grinch steal the West Village,” wrote one. Another wrote, “Time is running out,” and then there was a squeaky little “Help!”“It is meant in the spirit of the season,” said the community group’s executive director, Andrew Berman. “We are in a desperate situation.”‘Tis the season to have an agenda. As the number of Americans who send holiday cards has apparently been dropping, and many who do stick with the tradition are steering clear of religious references, holiday cards are changing shape and increasingly doubling as vehicles for other, less cozy, messages.According to the Greeting Card Association, 1.9 billion holiday cards will make the rounds this year, down from 2 billion one year ago. With the tradition fading and the yearly holiday card tradeoff being viewed widely as a lay ritual, growing numbers of people are feeling emboldened to insert their own completely nonseasonal messages into the envelope.This year, New York stationery shops report an increase in holiday cards that double as moving, birth, or save-thedate announcements. “From our point, it’s a timesaver,” said a design assistant at Ellen Weldon Design in Tribeca, Erica Younkin. “We’ll suggest it.”At Papyrus, the upscale stationery chain, the double-dipping trend started about two years ago and has grown about 30% since. “They do it because they want to cut costs, but also they do it because they want to be different, “said the manager of the Upper West Side branch, Rex Posadas. “It can be hard to make a holiday card that stands out.”Some people are even putting their holiday cards to work – using them as a conduit to scoring a better job. Allison Hemming, president of the Hired Guns, a recruiting firm in Manhattan, advises clients who are feeling professionally insecure to mail holiday cards that will impress future business contacts and writers of letters of reference. The cards should contain a very brief greeting, and in early January the senders should send an e-mail to set up a “follow up” lunch, Ms. Hemming counseled.“Don’t let your card get convoluted,” she said. “You don’t want to come across as forced and desperate.”Her acolytes are listening: This year she has received piles of cards from potential work contacts, one of whom had the gumption to stick her resume in the card. “That,” Ms. Hemming said, “was not a good move.”The first Christmas card is said to date back to 1843, when Sir Henry Cole of London hired a painter to design a card that he could send to his friends. Soon, others followed, and before long there were enough holiday cards to cause Puritans to denounce their merry images. In 1875, the German immigrant lithographer Louis Prong started mass-producing them, and a bona fide tradition was born.It is customary for the handwritten greetings contained within cards to be short and sweet, but the exhausting and elaborate “Dear all” inserts, which many a distant relative seems to favor, have become so prevalent that an academic article called “Constructing Personal Identities in Holiday Letters” appeared recently in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. The article hypothesizes that the letters are success propaganda, bragging writes, rather than true updates of the senders’ lives. In a recent interview on National Public Radio, a co-author, Stephen P. Banks, who teaches at the University of Idaho, said people even sprinkle in celebrities’ names – as in “Susie’s year was right out of a Cameron Diaz movie”- as a way to “elevate their own importance, the excitement of their own lives.”A Manhattan attorney, Amir Goldstein, recently got what looked like a harmless holiday card from his alma mater, Hofstra University Law School. “It looked like a Hallmark greeting card,” he said. Then he opened the card to discover it was a request for a donation. “I was like, ‘those sneaky, sneaky bastards,'” Mr. Goldstein said.His colleague Barbara Balbom received a similar holiday card from her law school. “People give most of their donations this time of year, so it makes sense,” she said. “Still, it gets out of hand.”The desire to kill two birds with one stone is perfectly understandable, but maxing out your holiday cards’ utility mangles the whole point of them. They’re supposed to be simple, free of strategy or underhandedness. Letters can be agonizing, sucking up days worth of creative juices. But all it takes to send a nice holiday card is a signature, a picture of a pine tree – make that a snowflake – an envelope, and a stamp. Why ruin it?In December a big envelope with a handwritten address sets up expectations, and there are few things as demoralizing as ripping one open to discover the sender has crafty, loveless intentions.The first holiday card to arrive at my apartment came last week, tucked between two sections of the New York Times. The card featured a traditional design, with a picture of a deer scene on the front. Inside there was an unfamiliar signature, underneath which it were the clarifying words “your New York Times carrier.”I was delighted. It had never occurred to me that my newspaper delivery person considered me to be more than an address on his route, but look how wrong I was. He cared! In his eyes I wasn’t just a drop-off point. I was a human being.A few days later, after I had promoted the card to a bookmark, I was reading on the subway when a small envelope floated out of my novel. I stared and stared at the words on the envelope until I realized what they were: the carrier’s name and address. He wasn’t wishing me happy holidays-he was reminding me to wish him happy holidays.The New York Times says it does not suggest or deter its delivery people on the subject of hinting, heavily, for tips. “The Times takes no position or policy on this nor do we monitor the cards our carriers may give to customers,” a company spokesman, Toby Usnik, said.A Park Slope resident, Phil Thurston, always makes a point of sending traditional holiday cards, but this year he said, “They’re doing double duty” – as thank-you cards for the gifts he received at his birthday party last March. He has yet to get around to writing them, though, so they have triple-duty potential: In addition to being holiday and thank you cards, they’ll also be New Year’s cards. Or Valentines.

A Holiday Card With Bite

A Holiday Card With Bite

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