Vive lè greeting cards!

Just the other day as I was brushing my teeth, I remembered an obscure aunt's postal address- word for word, pincode et al. Result of sending new year greeting cards year after year- for maybe ten-fifteen years in a row?  I remember the excitement around the New year. It started from the first week of December when my sister and I would decide (rather fight) on the theme for that year's cards. Often I won, not because I was older and my mum entrusted this responsibility to me, but because my sister's themes were downright baby-ish and immature. The task of getting the card supplies would be accomplished next. Shiny card paper, new brushes and paints were always required each year. With great excitement we'd start off- the first batch of five, ten cards would turn out super and after that both my sister and I would invariably fight and it would end in either the remainder of the cards being bought from CRY or HelpAge or Archies or yours truly struggling to fill up the quota by sketching at midnight. A parallel task would be to organise mailing lists. Great importance would be given to reciprocation (why send a card to great Aunt Meera when she hasn't sent us one for two years now?) and condescension (come on, poor lady will cheer up on seeing your card). In the end, we'd sort about fifty- seventy five odd recipients. Then came the onerous task of slotting the correct postal addresses. Since there was no google in those days, the ol trusted thumbed down government diary would be dug out to confirm the pin codes. Dad would be chided for not buying the correct denomination of postage stamps and Mum would fume about the delays in posting them (those were the days when all of us relied on that relic of a post office and kept them darned busy). Once the cards had been sent, we'd eagerly await the arrival of other relatives' cards. Those, and Dad's colleagues cards would be strung up in the living room- giving such a bright and jovial farewell to the old year. We welcomed the new year in style! Sadly, no one sends greeting cards anymore. SMS and e-greetings and phone calls have all chased the humble card to a precipitous death. The greeting card is dead. Long live the greeting card!