A former business, connected with card Christmas greetings, has vanished. National firms distributed their sample books to Muskoka printers in early fall. Locals then ordered their preferred one. The printing shops got and printed the requisite quantity, with the customer’s message on the blank interior and return address on its matching envelope. Early days of December were spent happily addressing them, signing the cards, and mailing them. All this rekindled a wide spectrum of relationships, and knitted society together.
There’s still local demand for tangible cards, as our era’s general stores – the supermarkets and pharmacies – prove with market-sensitive aisles of greeting cards for Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, birthdays, anniversaries, and milestone events. Some drip with saccharin sentiment. Others deliver the straight goods. Many offer a healthy laugh. All are pricy.
Countless individuals and organizations now transmit, via email, what they imagine to be a digital equivalent of traditional cards. They aren’t. Some creative firms, like Jackie Lawson’s, are better at crafting engaging messages by realizing the full potential of today’s electronic communications with music, animation, nostalgia, and the sender’s personal greeting.
Yet no matter how good these on-line greetings, they’re harder to cherish than the real deal, which you can take time to study, prop on a mantle, and enjoy for the season. How often do you go back for a second look at an on-line seasonal greeting?
Another victim of the internet revolution is the punchy postcard. “Weather’s great. Wish you were here!” How many variations of that brief message, on the flip-side of a captivating scene, were mailed from Muskoka resorts, camps, and holiday spots throughout the 20th century? The message’s brevity, as with tweets facing similar space limitations, made it pointed.
But the artful postcard has been vaporized by the narcissistic selfie. Books which charmingly document Muskoka’s evolution include Bruce McCraw’s “See You Next Summer: Postcard Memories of Sparrow Lake,” Allan Anderson and Ralph Beaumont’s “Postcard Memories of Muskoka,” and Bruce MacLellan’s two exquisite volumes of “Postcards from Lake of Bays.”
Enduring paper-printed artifacts are now overwhelmingly displaced by amorphous time-trapped digital forms which new technology sooner or later strands beyond access. Greeting cards are minor, if revealing, specimens in this revolution. A millennium or so from now historians and archeologists will likely conclude that few people still lived on this planet by the 21st Century. Amidst an increasingly virtual existence, our own Dark Age looms.
