Holiday greeting cards stand test of time

By EMILY BENNETT DILULLO
ebennett@yourmvi.com
You check your email. You check your text messages. You check your Facebook, along with additional social media accounts. But how often do you check your mailbox?
Yes, your physical mailbox — the often cylindrical container with the red, plastic flag on the side. And for city dwellers, how often do you put that miniature key into that little space in the wall?
And when you do, how frequently do you find something other than the week-old pizza shop flier you left in there in hopes it would disappear?
At Christmas and around the holidays, hopefully your chances for receiving a special piece of mail is magnified. While Americans are sending far less snail mail than they used to, one form of conventional mail has somehow managed to survive: the greeting card.
The general volume of physical mail being sent has dropped close to 43% since 2001, according to the U.S. Postal Service, and while the numbers related to sending cards have dropped all around, Americans still buy an estimated 6.5 billion greeting cards each year, according to the Greeting Card Association. Of that 6.5 billion, around 1.6 billion are Christmas-related, and greeting card mail has had significantly less losses than mail overall.
More than half of Americans still send holiday cards, according to the president of Shutterfly consumer division Jim Hilt, and some industry experts will insist millennials are partly responsible for the continued participation in card purchases. Perhaps they want to give their loved ones something tactile in a world consumed with social media and instant communication.
It would seem that for some, cards serve as an important part of their holiday season, just like hanging the stocking and decorating the tree.
For Cindy Bartolotta, sending personalized, hand-written cards each year is as essential as any other holiday practice. She remembers the warm feeling she got when she received her first letter in the mail as a little girl.

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