Greeting Cards

We are delighted with our new twin house, and love it when friends come to visit. This past spring, some friends came over and gifted us with an unexpected present and a card. It took me awhile to unwrap the gift because I was admiring the picture on the front of the card. It was colorful, festive and joyful. It looked like people were celebrating, but it wasn’t quite clear what they were celebrating. My friend was watching me closely as I read the sentiment. In her own handwriting she wrote out a blessing for our new home…she wrote it underneath the sentiment printed on the card, which was printed in another language.

I looked at her and she smiled as she told me the story behind the card. She found the package of cards while she was on a trip to Iceland. She liked the picture on front of the cards and asked the clerk if they were blank inside. The clerk indicated they were blank (possibly lost in translation?) so my friend purchased the beautiful cards. Back home, she was surprised when she opened the cards to see a sentiment printed inside, and it was not in English. What to do? She decided to ignore it. She did not even look up the phrase to see what it meant, and decided use the cards anyway… for any occasion she needed…she just wrote her own sentiment underneath the printed one.

I laughed when she told me that story. I liked her idea a lot, and was delighted to get one of these special cards.

(I did look up the translation and it says “Merry Christmas, Happy New Year” but I won’t tell my friend that. Obviously, she doesn’t want to know.)

Gary and I started a tradition of giving each other greeting cards when we were first married and continue to do so to this day, 47 years later. We exchange cards for Valentine’s Day, our birthdays, our anniversary, Easter and Christmas – that’s about 470 cards by now! And, as per usual, I kept them.

A few fun cards from the large assortment of cards in the box.

Now it was time to go through them…to enjoy re-reading them and then recycle them. We don’t want to store them in our new house.

We were home alone on Christmas Eve, so we thought that would be a good time to go through the cards and reminisce. It was a lot of fun looking at all of them… the different style of cards and reading our hand-written notes, if we added any.

Sometimes we gave each other the same card on the same year, and sometimes we gave the same card a year or two later. It was interesting and entertaining.

There are so many b e a u t i f u l cards. It’s hard to give them up, and I did keep a few. I think there are places that collect old cards to create new cards, and I thought about that, but it was overwhelming to think about in the midst of moving.

i like this writing theme…there was bicycle themes, cats themes, birds and flowers…o my…

We also made cards for each other occasionally.

Hard to tell in the photo, but these cards are extra large.

Going through the cards Gary and I gave to each other was a lot of fun, and then I was ready to recycle most of them.

Multiple cards made for us from our sons.

But, it felt different going through all the cards I saved that our sons had made and given to us over the years. We encouraged their creativity and they made some imaginative cards over the years.

Another pile of creative cards made by our sons.

We had the good intention to look at them and then recycle them, but I couldn’t do it. We looked at them, and I put them in some semblance of order, and kept most of them… to look at again when we’re even older. And who knows – maybe someday their children will find the cards in a box and enjoy seeing how creative their daddies were.

Tag: Greeting Cards

Greetings