<p>I just wrote out 40 yesterday. I try to include a little family update on any going to friends and family we don’t see often. I do love receiving them, letters and all!</p>
<p>Like a lot of you, I still send cards because I love to receive them. I have a lot of friends/family members who live in other parts of the country and this is the only time that I hear from them.</p>
<p>I was going to quit this year, but I wanted to send a wedding picture collage from S’s September nuptials to elderly relatives who are not computer savvy. I ordered 15 cards from Tiny Prints and sent 14. I always keep one for myself!</p>
<p>I pretty much do what the OP does. Cards to those far away that we see infrequently and to relatives in Europe that I don’t have as a friend on Facebook. Always a picture and a handwritten note. I’ll probably send about 15 this weekend.</p>
<p>Cards to family and friends that we don’t often see. Stopped the photo in the cards about 5 years ago. We only receive 2 “newsletters”, on from my cousin and one from my SIL.</p>
<p>I still send out about 150 cards. I love to do it, it makes me think, however briefly, of each recipient, from my childhood neighborhood, to high school, college, extended family, etc. And I love receiving them and seeing everyone’s family (it seems at least 3/4 of mine have letters or photos in them).</p>
<p>We usually just send a one line update on how old the kids are, what they are doing etc. And again, I like seeing and hearing what my friends families are up to. A couple friends write truly funny satirical letters or humorous takes on the year. No real bragging letters to read. :)</p>
<p>I send them and am starting to feel like a dinosaur. I hate the braggy ones. I also get annoyed by the political ones. But it’s a good kind of annual annoyance that I would miss.</p>
<p>I send out about forty cards and every year I drop someone else off. I am also a shutterfly user, although after I order this year, I saw that Target had a cheaper deal. I like getting cards in the mail so I probably will keep doing it. And like many others, only the elderly or non face book people get a note.</p>
<p>I love getting photo cards; I love getting letters or any kind of update, even the ‘junior league’ braggy ones, they are amusing. We have done photo cards ever since we moved far from our early home, just to stay in touch, but it has turned into a wonderful (well, to me, not to the kids!) way to have a photo of all of us each year.
We used to do a letter every year, but I felt like sometimes it was too perky, too good, so we began trying to find something amusing that happened, if we cannot find it in ourselves to write an amusing anecdote, we skip the letter. Things have been up & down, in a bad or sad year, it’s hard to want to share & summon the energy to do any letter, in a good year, it’s hard not to sound like a show off when you are really just excited.</p>
<p>We did always try to write with the audience in mind being old aunts who don’t hear the regular news.</p>
<p>I will admit that I really am not excited to get a card with a signature, I want more, photos or news!</p>
<p>No xmas cards. We send out a year-end newsletter folded like a brochure. My husband is a photographer and the photos are not just family but of the lake we live by, the Bronx zoo animals he has photographed or other people/places we have seen throughout the year. We include our year story but it is newsy and fun to read. </p>
<p>My neighbor called and left us a message that she normally hates year end letters but loved ours and is pleased she is on the mail to list.</p>
<p>We send out 70-90 to people all over the country that we otherwise don’t connect with except this one time of year.</p>
<p>For 20+ years we sent holiday cards with pictures of the girls. Last year I didn’t do it because we were living abroad and postal service was very iffy. I figured between FB and emails, we were pretty up to date with our closest and dearest. </p>
<p>I was very surprised when D1 (out of the house, age 23) said to me, “I hope we are doing xmas cards this year. It was like we just died and disappeared from the face of earth last year. What was that all about?” I was thinking to myself, “Hello!!! Last time I remembered, you no longer lived with us, and I am the one who does all the work.”</p>
<p>So I did what Class2015 did, I joined them. I used Shutterfly and produced this over the top holiday card with montage of the girls, us as a family, places we’ve traveled to.</p>
<p>D1 came over to our apartment this weekend, looked at our xmas tree and said, “Where is my first xmas ornament? Did X (D2) hide it?” You would think once they’ve moved out then they wouldn’t be so territorial.</p>
<p>For the last bunch of years, I have sent an email letter with a picture. That’s it.</p>
<p>I send around 100 cards every year. I love getting them. We used to send a ohoto of just the kids, but now send photos that include DH and I, because one year, before the advent of Facebook, we received a card with an unexpected photo of friends (although we hadn’t seen these people in 15 years, we considered them to be good friends) and were sort of shocked at how old they looked! So we started including photos of us… To sort of nudge our long distance friends towards not fainting at our own aging process if/when we ever saw each other again.</p>
<p>I write a letter every year. It includes stupid things we did all year, first world family disasters, funny things our kids did. This year I scrolled through my cell phone and facebook posts and compiled a page of snippets like this:</p>
<p>10 PM call from S2: “Could you wake up Dad? I really need help.”
Me: “What’s wrong?”
S2: “I’ve been trying to sneeze all day and I can’t get it out.”
Me: “No, I’m not waking your dad for that.”
Next day, 10PM, S2’s Facebook status: “I just sneezed for the first time in 36 hours. O.M.G. Victory!”</p>
<p>People like my letter. Nothing negative, or sad or braggy. Just lighthearted nonsense that we said or did in the past year.</p>
<p>I still send cards and love to receive them. Last year I was sick from Thanksgiving to Christmas, so I didn’t send cards. But I did get the envelopes addressed, so this year I am using that set of cards. </p>
<p>I love the braggy letters and find them hilarious. My sister always writes an unintentionally funny one and we also get one from former colleagues of my H that is just over the top. I would rather have a brag letter than just a signature.</p>
<p>We (meaning me) stopped sending them last year. Dh was disappointed, but as I pointed out, he was more than welcome to write, address and mail Christmas cards if he so chose. So… we are now officially done with that. Yay!</p>
<p>I love getting cards and just opened one from my cousin. We’ve received three this year, not counting the one from the vet. We see the people we want to see and catch up with those far away on Facebook.</p>
<p>I keep one card and one letter that I send out each year in a “Christmas Book” my MIL gave to me when we were first married. It gives me a kind of history of what happened over the year. It is amazing how fast time goes!!</p>