Greeting Cards

With Holidaymas coming up, there is a very important subject that I feel needs to be touched upon regarding a common tradition that nearly every religious OR secular person participates in at some point -- sending greeting cards. Birthdays, holidays, sympathies, congratulations, thinking-of-yous, there's a greeting card for just about every situation.

I have a love/hate relationship with greeting cards. From an etiquette standpoint, they are a very excellent way to show your sympathy, love, thoughts, prayers, or whatever's on your mind for another person. A greeting card is a VERY excellent way to get back in touch with someone, and even if you can't afford to send gifts to everyone in your family (I group 'friends' with family; 'relatives' are your blood relations) I can guarantee that any family worth having will appreciate getting a greeting card.

There's just one problem ... they're mostly made of trees.

From a granola-eater's perspective, they're a bit sad. I always get a batch of them every year, and I know that no matter how strong my sentiment is for my family and how touched I am by their thoughts of me, I won't really look at them past the holiday season. Once the sentiment has faded and a few years go by with them sitting in a box, what's to do with them then?

The first step is, of course, RECYCLE THEM. If your area doesn't recycle paper by now, you should be having a talk with the city/county about at least arranging a once-a-week pickup outside the local grocery store. Recycling paper is ridiculously easy, and even if it only gets reused once as toilet paper, that's still an improvement (and better the TP be recycled than brand new -- you can't reuse toilet paper...) over just throwing it away.

You can let your family know that you would prefer NOT to receive greeting cards, for the aforementioned reasons of wastefulness. They may look at you a little funny, but that's part of the life of a granola-eater. You get used to it, I promise. Offer alternative suggestions -- have them make a donation to a good charity (no-kill animal sanctuary, food banks, homeless/women's shelters are a start), electronic cards (although I'm not a huge fan of them myself, for some reason), or at least ask them to use RECYCLED paper cards or alternative fibers. A partner I had in a knitting swap sent me a card made with kenaf -- I was SO HAPPY to learn of a company that uses alternative fiber to make their paper!!

If you still want to receive greeting cards, and can't quite bear to actually toss Aunt Martha's adorable snowman Holidaymas cards she sends you every year, here's an alternative I remember my own Aunt Vivian getting me into when I was little: Instead of recycling them, REUSE THEM and make greeting card boxes.

I found a nice tutorial here: Art Lesson Sixteen from kid-at-art.com. I think the HTML could use a little work, but then I code basic HTML in my sleep. (No, seriously ... I've had HTML dreams. It's bizarre and a little frightening.) The instructions are fairly sound. As they're a bit fiddly to figure out, if you want to get some practice in first, try using the cover of an old phone book or a cereal box (so you get something closer to the right thickness), or maybe one of those pamphlets people keep leaving on your doorstep and in your mailbox for one cause or another, reasonable or no.

Once you have the boxes made, you have wonderful boxes that you can do all kinds of things with. REUSE some of your leftover yarn or thread from another project (or find a local crafter who's willing to part with some), poke a hole in one corner of the box, and turn it into an ornament. Or if you have small gifts to give, use them in place of wrapping paper (horrid, awful stuff, and I'll be touching on that too) and give your family a REUSABLE container! Your Aunt Martha may well recognize the design on the box you gave her, and you can include a message that you loved getting the card, and instead of just tossing it you turned it into something that can be used again and again. Just be prepared for her to start sniffling into your shoulder when she hugs you.

On to the matter of giving greeting cards.

Again, we touch on the idea of etiquette vs conservation. It shows you care about them, but it can be considered wasteful. When you give a greeting card, look to see what it is made of. Aim for at least recycled paper, if not the alternative fiber I mentioned earlier. By now you should know about the slightly higher cost of alternatives to mass-consumer products, but such is the price (literally) of taking the higher moral ground.

If you want to get fancy, include a piece of scrap paper with written instructions on how to turn the greeting card into a box themselves -- and encourage them to practice on the piece of paper so they don't accidentally ruin the card! On the chance they may not be interested in making the card into a box, mention that it can be recycled.

Don't be afraid to talk to your family about the idea of greeting cards. Some of them may only send them out because 'That's how things are done!' and haven't thought of alternatives before. Some of them may welcome the idea of alternative uses for cards, and would enjoy the idea of reusing the boxes. It never hurts to be vocal about it.