Are Greeting Card Messages Getting Longer? A Very Serious Investigation
The best greeting card Carla Lyles ever received was a homemade Valentine’s Day card made by her six-year-old son Kaleb, in which he asked her to be his Valentine. “He drew hearts all over it and it read, ‘You’re the best mommy in the world,’’' says the Houston, TX native and founder of the Carla Sue card company, choking up a bit at the memory.
I have a card that makes me misty-eyed too: a birthday card my dad wrote to me in 2019, in which he called me “a woman of integrity” — an earnest and uncharacteristically formal statement which melted down my iron heart into a shimmering puddle of sap when I first read it, and every subsequent time I’ve dug it out of my mementos box since then. His is my favorite, but that coffer is full of greeting cards I treasure — all of which contain at least a few lines of thoughtful, handwritten text.
This brings me to an extremely specific and somewhat idiosyncratic “champagne problem” I’ve been complaining about for years: that although most people love cards for the personalized messages inside, many greeting cards these days have far too much pre-written text or design — never seeming to leave quite enough space for the kind of specific note I wanted to write (and read). More and more, I’ve been feeling like every card I pull from the shelves has so much sappy text or… some giant pop-up poodle screaming out at me? This leaves me with little space to pour out my heart and express my feelings.
And guys, I have a lot of feelings. As a Cancer who’s constantly “brimming with big emotions,” according to my therapist, I need space to write out my thoughts about my favorite people every now and then — to reflect on our memories together, and to get a little gushy. I want this from the notes I receive too. Not necessarily dossiers of affection, but at least a few meaningful sentences. And I’ve always assumed that I’m not alone in this. Turns out, I’m not. When I said I was writing this story, one of my coworkers joked, “Someone gave me a birthday card this year and only signed it at the bottom, and I almost cried.”
And yet, a recent browse of the Valentine’s Day cards at my local Walgreens (and many previous trips to the pharmacy looking for last-minute birthday and holiday cards over the past few years) revealed what seems to me to be a bizarre trend: cards with no room to actually write a personal message. There were cards with paragraph upon paragraph of pre-written text. In one American Greetings card, they couldn’t fit everything they wanted to say on the standard two-page card, so they added an additional inside flap. “In case you’re wondering, I notice. I notice what a difference you make in my life,” another note said. Ugh.