Hallmark Cards

The act of giving someone a present is a very self-fulfilling process. It’s great to see the look on their face, the excitement…the magic. Sometimes going out and buying the gift is a fun experience as well. Could provide a few laughs and entertainment while you ponder in a store all of the possibilities. Buying the card for the gift…that just might be the worst experience ever and I might officially quit giving cards for any holiday or birthday from here on out.

Now I guess I can almost understand giving a Hallmark card if you need to mail something or can’t be present for the event. However, if you are physically going to be handing the present to the person and they will open it immediately, can’t we do without the card? It’s not like I will hand a person a gift and they’ll be like “Wow, I wonder who this one is from?” You know who the box is coming from, I just handed it to you. But no, the rules of society say that we need to lay down $4.75 for a regular sized Hallmark card to give a little explanation why we are giving a gift. Are there people out there who on their Birthday start doubting themselves and think that it might be Christmas? Or maybe sometimes the cards that start with “To my dad…” are there to remind the person what their relationship is. “Hmmm…Oh yeah, this is my son, not my grandmother.” Plus, there is so much pressure with the card being opened right in front of you; this whole process needs to stop.

I’ve wasted so much time roaming the rows of potential Hallmark cards trying to find one that perfectly “fits me.” The key is finding that one diamond in the rough that isn’t too corny, makes you giggle, and won’t completely humiliate you when a person reads it in front of you. So you go up and down the rows giving the cards practice reads, testing them on people, analyzing each word. You try to visualize yourself giving the card to the person and anticipate the reaction. In the end, the entire process takes around 1-3 hours but you do feel a slight sense of accomplishment when you finally pick a card. You took a near impossible task of looking through hundreds of cards in front of you to find the one that truly completes the gift giving process.

Now here’s some bad news that you don’t want to hear but I’m going to lay it down anyway. I’m pretty sure that most people don’t care what’s in the card and once they get it start thinking about how long they are obligated to keep it on display. The person who received the card knows that this person probably spent tons of time looking for the perfect card. But how long can you really keep a Peanuts character card reminding you that you are old out on the kitchen counter? People giving the cards become so emotionally attached to the card they give that you have to be very careful. Maybe there should be a direct correlation between the time people spend looking for cards and how long you must hold on to it. So if you searched for a card for 30 minutes, you jot that fact on the inside of the card and the recipient keeps it on display for a day and 10 minutes. If you looked for the card for 5 days, the recipient will keep your birthday card for 3 months. It’s that simple, just give us some kind of formula to fix the card keeping etiquette.

If you work for Hallmark in the writing department and are reading this, please try harder. I think the majority of the writers gave up trying to be humorous somewhere in the mid 90’s. Actual funny cards would probably change everything but until then, we’ll keep looking for the best we can find and hope for the best. On a side note, this article once again proves my theory that Hallmark controls the world.