LAUNCHS QUAD
Holiday Cards Go Green (And I Couldn't Be Happier)
As a child, my least favorite day of the year was always the day after Thanksgiving. Before the lingering scent of turkey grease and mulled wine had fully dissipated from the far corners of the house, before the winter snow even had a chance to settle on the ground, my brother and I were stuffed into our most offensive, uncomfortable outfits and led to various picturesque locations throughout the state of Rhode Island for the most dreaded few hours of the year: the holiday card photo shoot.
My parents, faithful servants to longstanding family traditions, insist on sending family photo holiday cards each and every year to hundreds of their closest friends and family, even though my brother and I have been out of the house for nearly a decade. Sweater chafe, curling iron burns, turtleneck strangulation, and smile strain are only a few of the many injuries sustained over the years of torment that led holiday cards to be one of my least favorite parts of the winter months. But don't worry, children of the 21st century. Relief is in sight.
The first ever print run of Christmas cards was a mere 1,000, commissioned by Englishman Henry Cole who simply didn't have the time to make enough personalized cards. Things have certainly changed since those days of Queen Victoria, but recent stats are showing that card production is back on the decline. This means your local drug stores are selling fewer boxes of prepackaged Ruldolph prints, while less and less children are being shoehorned into last year's loafers as they say Ôcheese' beneath the glare of flashbulbs and bubble lights. The reason? Green technology.
One of this season's usurpers of the traditional Christmas card is clean, green, and begging users to walk all over them. ReProduct has created greeting cards and envelopes made from earth-friendly, people-friendly materials. They come to recipients in a 2-way envelope, much like Netflix, along with a pre-paid return postage provided by Shaw Industries. Once the recipient is done with the card, they put it in the prepaid envelope, mail it back to Shaw, who then uses both card and envelope to create carpet backing for carpet tiles. These cards are just starting to gain tread in the industry, and what better way to hold onto the memories of loved ones at the holidays than to turn them into a nice berber?
Vidigreet is another company taking the holidays by storm this year with the introduction of a video greeting card service. Vidigreet combines professionally created content with your own personalized greeting, allowing users to send quick videos for all those special occasions. In addition to eliminating paper waste, creator Jeff Gorman combines actors, fancy camera work, and sharp creativity to achieve the ultimate purpose of the greeting card to begin with: social connectivity. He just does it on a much higher level than my poor mother, who has spent the better half of her adult life addressing Christmas cards by hand in her tidy, elementary school teacher script. So if you're looking to avoid the carpal tunnel, Vidigreet is one of several video card services available this holiday season.
Though not everyone is quick to embrace the greener side of the Christmas spectrum, us tree lovers won't be seeing red this year. Technology isn't killing the Christmas card, but offering countless ways to personalize and send them inexpensively and with ease, without the overwhelming paper waste. There's also the matter of ink toxins, card production pollutions, added mail weight which adds to annual fuel-consumption, and un-earth-friendly card disposal. Certainly these factors weight in with nearly every manufactured product, but relief is in sight as video-cards, E-cards, and re-cards are making a splash this season. While at least a hundred of my parents nearest and dearest will be receiving a neatly signed photo card featuring the Savageau family in all of their holiday splendor this Christmas, overall holiday card production has dropped substantially. Knowing my family, however, even if we convert to an e-card by 2008, there will still be itchy sweaters and Christmas lights waiting right around the corner.