Is it just me or do greeting cards suck these days? No matter what the occasion, you cannot find a good one. It’s getting to the point where nearly all of them fall into just three categories – cards for kids play music, cards for adults are long, drawn out diatribes about how the giver of the card has a hard time expressing his/her feelings so the stream-of-consciousness epic does it for them, and the last kind is a recent development where readers send in family photos with funny captions and the greeting companies turn those into cards in lieu of creating cards themselves. Outsourcing, basically.
These categories – music, diatribes, outsourcing – are all terrible and the individual results of these categories are terrible. Even the few remaining cards that don’t fit one of these descriptions are lousy. You just can’t find quality cards anymore.
The rambling feelings-dump cards, which also happen to be filled with bad metaphors, are my least favorite. When you open them, they usually sound something like this:
To my wonderful wife on our anniversary…
We’ve sailed some rocky waters together over the years, but I love the course our relationship has steered us on. I can always count on you to be there and I hope you feel the same way about me. I don’t always know the right words to say, but you always seem to know exactly how I feel, which makes it weird that I was compelled to buy a card filled with a frank discussion of my feelings written by someone else.
The last 10 years with you have been the best of my life and I can’t wait to see the adventures we take over the next 10. Perhaps we’ll scale the peaks of all of our hopes and dreams, but even if we slip along the way, I know we’ll be there for each other to properly secure the ropes of our love to the mountain of life.
Before you, I felt lost and unsatisfied (and I don’t mean that in a sexual way, but I guess I kind of do to some degree). Thank you for finding me and giving my soul life, love and happiness. As long as your brother doesn’t try to borrow thousands of dollars from us again, I know we’ll be sharing our golden years together.
And that’s just the left side.
In the age of dying newspaper subscriptions and 140-character tweets, it seems counterintuitive that cards like this not only exist, but are practically the only ones you can find anymore. The card industry has to be hurting. I mean, does anybody buy cards anymore? The post office is nearly extinct and no one under the age of 45 communicates by any means other than texting and tweeting, right? Hallmark can’t employ a lot of writers given what I mentioned earlier about card companies relying on the general public to create the few remaining adult cards that don’t double as novels (unfortunately I’m not talking about “adult” cards, which we need way more of, by the way).
Since people are buying greeting cards at the same rate they’re buying VCRs, you’ve probably never even seen these publicly-produced cards unless you’ve sent one into Hallmark and they used it. But trust me, as someone who still buys cards, they’re out there.
Fortunately there are some different genres of cards that you can find for the proper birthday celebrations. Like a half-naked chick or dude on the front of a card, always looking oiled and bronzed, with a message that says something like, “She/He really, really wants you…” and the inside says, “… to have a great birthday!” And of course there’s no shortage of old people talking about their latest body part that aches, sags or fails to hold in gas. These started popping up around the time that we became interested in oily, naked members of the opposite sex and farts. I believe this time period is called ‘The Dawn of Man’.
Come to think of it, I guess I should stop complaining about a lack of quality cards. Flatulent old ladies, half naked dudes… those are sure to brighten anyone’s day.
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