The Alienation of Holiday Greeting Cards

How They Contribute to Growing Problem of Depersonalization (Vol. 5; Issue 1)

I wish all readers a 2025 full of mystery, adventure, and danger! As noted in earlier essays, I shall not directly wish for your happiness. Joy comes and goes. Directly striving for it ensures it never arrives. I hope, instead, you find meaning and fulfillment. Most importantly, I hope you cherish and nourish your loving relationships into next year and beyond.

These sentiments create the perfect transition to another passionate rant about the problem of depersonalization—this one triggered by the massive, commercial holiday card industry.

Everyone understands, and many fear, that emailing, texting, and internet gaming create ever-increasing social alienation. Companies like Meta, Google, and X devise clever ways to invite you inward—and not in a positive way. They literally seek eyeballs. You see the evidence everywhere. Entire families dining in restaurants are often alone-with-the-other, peering at their phones until the food arrives. Neither the resultant progression of loneliness nor the decline in everyday social skills should surprise us. Holiday greeting cards illustrate another, perhaps more subtle, form of depersonalization, another way we slouch towards isolation.

To my surprise, humans have relied on people writing notes on cards for us for more than a century. Companies began printing pre-written messages on greeting cards in the late 1800s. The practice began in Germany, where printers sold cards with pre-written sentimental messages. The trend crossed the Atlantic, influencing American greeting card companies, like Hallmark, which began the same practice in 1907.

How troubling that, well before technology marginalized love and creativity, greeting card companies beat it to the punch. Consumers no longer need to think. Hallmark and its (diminishing) competitors write notes for you. You only need to search for what their writers invent. All kinds of kitsch greetings like “have a happy birthday” or “congrats on your baby boy” sell by the bushel. “Sorry for your loss,” is sadly popular also despite the vacuous phrase. Hallmark sells cards with trite aphorisms for every conceivable occasion.

Hallmark has done nothing but grow malignantly since its inception. In 1981, it acquired Valentine & Sons of Dundee, Scotland—one of the world's oldest publishers of postcards. In 1984, Hallmark acquired W. N. Sharpe Holdings, a 114–year-old British greeting card manufacturer and Binney & Smith, which manufactured crayons. Those familiar with Kurt Vonnegut’s writings will think Hallmark itself must be part of the Ramjack corporation. Hallmark earned $3.4 billion in 2023.

Oh, boy, I really fear alienating friends as I identify two related and equally hateful practices. First are those ubiquitous, mass-produced pictures of the happy, smiling family. They come in various poses; they appear with varied backgrounds. If these come without any personal, written message, I glance at them for a few seconds. Then, I violently toss them into the recycling bin. At least they can provide pulp for another card. At least part of a tree can be saved. I mean, really? Nice to see you visited the pyramids in Egypt, ate at a fancy San Francisco restaurant, or took a catamaran to Catalina. But where’s the intimacy? Do you ever see one of these photo cards showing your friend standing by the bed of her dying father?

Equally abhorrent are the mimeographed letters addressed, “to my family and friends.” Like I do with those fake photo-cards, I quickly scan these missives for a personal note. A sentence or two is all that would matter. It would be great to read, “Hey, Alan, thinking of you, wishing you a meaningful new year, and here’s an update” or something like that. If such personal words are missing, these also land in the recycling bin. Why would I want to be part of an “audience” reading about your life?

These two practices, plus the pre-written Hallmark greeting industry, show the prescience of author Christopher Lasch’s 1991 book, The Culture of Narcissism. Writing about the 1980s, Lasch could never have imagined the subsequent explosion of our ego-centric culture. Pre-written greetings, family-photo-cards, and mass-produced “personal” reports involve no interaction whatsoever. Receivers of these vainglorious messages are asked to read a fake poem, look at their friends smiling (always) in Rome, Hollywood, Tampa, or London, or read their photocopied descriptions of their last year.

Notice how, again, these communications involve no conversations, discussions, explorations, or emotional exchanges. They epitomize one-way, narcissistic communication. Michel Foucault (1991) anticipated that the contemporary person would become an an “object of information, never a subject in communication” (p. 200). Sending and receiving these impersonal cards perfectly illustrates the idea. You’re sending an object to an object. No subject to subject interaction occurs.

In fairness, swimming against the tide of depersonalization is exhausting. Or, some might argue, it is impossible. The media practically beg us to either hide or to brag. Perhaps those who rely on such cards are innocents, victimized by the waves of dispassionate efficiency forced upon us. Nearly every day, I hear the coldly metallic, “have a nice day,” uttered by the computerized voice at the automated parking lot. Or, God forbid, you call a major corporation like Verizon. There, you’re greeted by an AI program, which, despite it’s alleged intelligence, takes a half-hour to direct you to a human. Are we just becoming numb to the depersonalization?

Grist for another essay, MIT linguist and social activist Noam Chomsky (2011) believes these firms intentionally depersonalize. He argues that power is held by nation-states and multi-national corporations. Individual persons have essentially none. They need to organize into groups, like labor unions or activist organizations, such as Greenpeace, to even barely compete. Therefore, the more governments and businesses depersonalize and disempower, the better. We are slaves to the market. This leaves us all with some difficult questions:

Have we been inculcated into a kind of stimulus overload preventing us from “being” more personal with our loved ones?

Or, have we been successfully brainwashed into “being” impersonal?

In either case, it is quite the loss. We’re unequivocally social animals. The persistent insistence on isolation hurts. Commodity fetishism offers scant relief. As the timeless sages John Lennon and Paul McCartney proclaim:

All You Need Is Love.

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And check out my book, Lover, Exorcist, Critic: Understanding Depth Psychotherapy, available on Amazon.

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References

Chomsky, N. (2011). How The World Works. New York: Soft Skull Press.

Foucault, M. (1991) Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage,

Lasch, C. (1991). The Culture of Narcissism. New York: Norton.