The Christmas Card Elves’ Workshop Is Teeming With Ideas

Americans will mail an estimated 2.6 billion holiday greeting cards to friends and loved ones this month.

Christmas is the largest card-sending occasion in the United States and, except for the U.S. Postal Service, card maker Hallmark touches more of them than anyone else.

The Kansas City, Mo.-based company figures the average American household will send and receive 28 Christmas cards.

Artists, designers and writers there have gone on retreats, traveled, studied and worked in teams to come up with their designs. Because they are working nearly a year ahead, while card senders are doing their thing this year, they are finishing up with designs for 2001.

This year, they’ve created 2,000 designs (1,500 individual designs and 500 new designs for boxed cards) in new forms, shapes and colors.

“The demand for traditional paper cards has not changed for the last 10 years. But people also are sending online greetings, making some of their own cards and sending holiday letters rather than Christmas cards. But that doesn’t worry us because we have products out there for all the ways people want to communicate,” said Deidre Parkes, spokeswoman for Hallmark.

Hallmark has its own online service, One to Many, available on its Web site. Computer geeks can pick out a card design and message from 134 different cards, supply their holiday mailing list and the company will do it all. To personalize these cards, including the inside message and a personal closing, and mail them costs about 75 cents more than the card’s retail cost.

But the trend watchers at Hallmark don’t expect the Internet to put a crunch on the market for traditional paper greetings.

“It’s really hard to share online greetings,” Parkes says. “You can’t pick it up and show it to someone else unless you print it out. Online greetings, we think, are being sent to less intimate acquaintances. People who truly want to stay in touch with friends year after year will send them traditional Christmas cards.”

But even traditionalists are in for some changes, like better-tasting glue on envelopes and a range of colors other than red and green. New winter colors are cool blue, lavenders and silver.

This year’s batch of holiday greetings is equally divided among traditional, humorous and contemporary designs. “About 60% of the holiday line focuses on Christmas,” says Parkes. The remaining 40% offers more general “holiday greetings” and are designed for people with friends of varying beliefs (or for those who can’t get their cards out in time for Christmas).

In general, more holiday cards are being designed for women and Latinos. There are more Kwanzaa cards, a wider range of Hanukkah greetings, more for nontraditional families, and even cards for family pets to send and receive.

Charlie Brown and Snoopy might surpass the Norman Rockwell, Currier & Ives and other traditional holiday designs this year because Hallmark is spotlighting the 50th anniversary of the Peanuts comic strip and the 40th anniversary of Hallmark’s partnering with Peanuts creator, the late Charles Schulz.

Meanwhile, thousands of greetings are lined up on the racks--or in the mail--emblazoned with art designed to attract attention and words created to express the sentiments of the sender.