Sending holiday greetings not in the cards for many this year

WASHINGTON — It's the middle of December, and Peg Willingham wants to know: Where are all the Christmas cards?

"I've only gotten about four," said the Falls Church, Va., mother as she tabulated the meager pile in the little red basket that serves as her card caddy each year.

"Normally I'd have a pretty full basket by now, at least 15 or 20 cards. I'm trying not to take it too personally."

She shouldn't. This season is shaping up as a ho-ho-hum year for holiday cards, at least the kind you can collect in a little red basket. Even the post office has noticed a significant thinning of the usual torrent of festive envelopes.

For the first two weeks of December, said Postal Service spokesman Michael Woods, "we are seeing about an 11 percent decrease in first-class cancellations from last year, which is a good proxy for the number of cards and letters coming through the system."

Observers say a perfect winter storm may have formed to suppress this year's holiday mail surge: an unemployment rate that makes a roll of 44-cent stamps one more difficult expense for many people (and adds up to a bleak Christmas letter for friends and family); increasingly popular and cheap (or free) Internet alternatives, such as e-cards and Facebook; and heightened environmental concerns that have some people weighing the carbon footprint of all those cardboard Season's Greetings.

The cardmakers trade group says it sees nothing amiss, based on an informal survey of Hallmark, American Greetings and other industry leaders.

"It might be down slightly, but generally speaking, it seems relatively the same as last year," said Barbara Miller, spokeswoman for the Greeting Card Association. "But we're talking about 2 billion cards here. You have to see something major before the needle even moves."

But retailers have a different view, and they see a shift away from cards. Although mega-card-seller Wal-Mart wouldn't comment on sales for the season, Joshua Thomas, a spokesman for Target, said his company isn't selling as many as usual.

Beth Charbonneau, 35, a psychotherapist from College Park, Md., decided to opt out of sending cards this year. With a busy practice, a 2-year-old daughter and an onslaught of visitors expected, Charbonneau reluctantly swapped a holiday greetings model dating back to the 1800s for this four-sentence posting on Facebook: "Dear Everyone, Please consider this your holiday card for the year. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Blessed Yule, and so on. Sorry to be a lame friend but, really, I'm just not Superwoman. I admit defeat on holiday cards."

Charbonneau said Facebook provided an irresistible alternative to the time-consuming ritual of buying, addressing, personalizing and mailing the 30 to 40 cards she usually sends along with a family photo.

Meanwhile, Willingham's nearly empty red basket makes her only more determined to get busy with her own stack of envelopes.

She appreciates the e-mailed holiday letters she's gotten in lieu of a physical card, but said sitting at a computer to read them feels more like work than Christmas.

"A lot of my friends aren't sending real cards this year," Willingham said. "I suspect every year it will decline, just like the rest of Western civilization."