5 Reasons To Bless Your Loved Ones With Good Old-Fashioned Christmas Cards This Year

When I was growing up, my mother received dozens of Christmas cards. She’d incorporate them into the holiday decor by hanging them on a wall in our family room. I remember being eager to see what “real” letters were buried in the stacks of generic catalogs and holiday sale flyers that arrived with each new mail delivery. 

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I’d come home from school to find new cards of various shapes, sizes, and degrees of simplicity and extravagance added to the card wall. I took great delight in choosing my favorites and re-admiring them — even helping my mother arrange them so the “best” ones (typically those festooned with glitter) were at my eye level (this was before I fully grasped the selfless spirit of the season). 

These days, my mother is lucky to get a handful of snail-mail Christmas cards. USA Today reported in 2019 that “major retailers, including CVS and Walmart, [were] poised to cut back on cards, and greeting card companies have closed hundreds of standalone locations” because “more and more people are using text and email and e-cards, and fewer people are buying cards.” 

Let us not let sit idly by on our screens and let such a beautiful tradition die. Exchanging Christmas cards offers many benefits — not just to the receiver, but to the soul of the sender as well. Here are five reasons you should send Christmas cards this year.

1. Handwritten Cards Are More Creative and Memorable 

Most modern people are adept at firing off a text or email in a dash without much thought. But if you’ve taken the time recently to sit down and compose something by hand, you’ve likely noticed that it feels different. Your words are more deliberate, perhaps, and your expressions more calculated — eloquent, even — as you let them develop in time for your out-of-shape writing hand to keep up. 

The Wall Street Journal reported on several studies showing that “something about writing things down excites the brain.” Psychology Today noted that the practice increases creativity and “engages your motor skills, memory, and more.”

If months or years have passed since you last communicated with your Christmas card recipient, an activated memory should surely come in handy. I find when I write letters by hand, I pause often to decide on the perfect phrasing. I also think more about the person I’m writing to — what we have in common, what I love about the person, what makes him or her special, etc. — than I do when I’m simply typing up something quickly. 

It’s a cathartic feeling to reflect on the beautiful souls God has put in your life, to check in on them, and to express gratitude to them for their goodness. Writing by hand also evokes the elusive “mindfulness” we are always being encouraged to seek, and being mindful of others is what Christmastime is, or should be, all about. 

Writing out cards doesn’t just activate the brain of the person writing it.