You can send people holiday cards over the internet now. How does that make any sense? Getting a card from someone is supposed to be a lasting endeavor. The card isn’t supposed to just disappear after you delete all the read messages in your inbox, it’s supposed to be saved and looked back on in the future. Sending someone a digital card takes away the physical joy of holding a card in your hands. If you’re someone who prefers a digital greeting card experience that’s fine, but at least make it personal.  Greeting cards have become unnaturally specific pieces of general information that anyone could give to anybody else. This makes sense economically but is really just stupid. No one is writing or making their own cards anymore. Sure, some people do and those people are awesome, but the majority of Americans just buy cards that have cool sound effects wired into them.

Greeting cards are now only for certain times. If you walk down the greeting card aisle in Wal-Mart you’ll see that they are all categorized by birthday cards, thank you cards, mother’s day cards, wedding cards, and other special occasions. Most of them aren’t blank. This is problematic for people who buy them to actually write in them. It’s even more problematic when you just need a friendly non-specific card and all they have are birthday, get well, and romantic cards. So no, no one cares about greeting cards anymore because the only thing they’re good for is holding iTunes gift cards and other non-personal stuff that you get for people when you have to.

If you like to buy people funny cards you find when you go looking around the store that’s fine, but if you’re someone who wants to personalize a card then the best bet is to just make your own. Most of the cards with writing in them already aren’t even good. Yeah, there are a few good ones, but most just say stuff like “have a good Christmas.” Couldn’t they have just made that card blank and let you write that in yourself? No one has any imagination anymore, and that is a real shame. How are we ever gonna be smart enough to finally control jet pack technology if the average person isn’t capable of writing a few clever sentences on every greeting card they buy?

Can you imagine if Thomas Jefferson would have just phoned it in and tried to go buy a Declaration of Independence? It would have ruined American history. We probably would have lost the Revolutionary War. If he had bought the Declaration it probably would have said something like this, “Happy birthday you’re the best king thirteen colonies could ask for.” That would not have gotten the message across at all, and it wouldn’t because no greeting card, that has been pre-written, can be mean or negative in anyway. This is why cyberbullying is such a problem. No one’s sending each other passive-aggressive greeting cards anymore. You know, the ones that say, wish you were here with a picture of whoever sent it sitting on a beach while you’re stuck at, home in the middle of winter.

The only way to save the greeting card is to somehow get everyone in the world a messenger bird. This way everyone would be communicating through tiny greeting cards that would be delivered by the birds. Now I know what you’re thinking: isn’t this a step backwards? No, it’s not, it’s probably the biggest leap forward since the moon landing. I say this because as a species we would be knowingly dialing back our own technology in order to salvage a superior perspective provided to us by living under simpler means. This is crazy, it would show our dominance over our own advancement while bringing the tradition of the hand written greeting card back from the grave.

Everyone has gotten a note, a letter, or some kind of card in the mail that, for some reason, said the perfect thing. Moments like those are special and should be cherished. So let’s not settle for simply commenting happy birthday on someone’s Facebook timeline, and do more than just buy any stereotypical pre-written birthday greeting card. Make or write in the card yourself and give more than just a piece of paper to someone. Give them a piece of yourself.