Why Paper Greeting Cards Are Here to Stay

It all started with the Sumerians about 3,000 BC when they first wrote communications on clay tablets, the same medium that the Minoans favored a thousand years later. The ancient Egyptians invented the hieroglyphs five centuries later but preferred to write them on papyrus, reeds that were abundant along the Nile River and dried and overlaid over one another to make a writing surface.

Around the same time the Chinese wrote pictograms on animal shoulder bones, the Aztecs used beaten bark on which to paint their written word. The Greeks came much later and introduced parchment (sheep skin), in the same way that Romans used them alongside vellum (similar to parchment but made of calf or goat skin). However, it was the Chinese who introduced the use of writing medium that we still use today - paper. The invention of the printing press, which also took place there, as well as paper making techniques, made paper communications all the more affordable and therefore widespread.

In our age, it's not surprising that we are exchanging electronic greeting cards than their paper equivalent. But while paper communications appear to be eclipsed by everything digital, it's not going out of style anytime soon. Much like the clay tablets of the Sumerians, it may take a long while for paper communications to be totally taken over by another medium that is yet to be conceived.

Some say that that medium has already arrived and firmly in place. But even with the invasion of social media as our primary form of keeping in touch with each other, there is something nostalgic about receiving personal or intimate communication using a tangible medium like paper; it's like glue to our relationship with something we can touch. True, electronic cards are easier to do and much easier to deliver, but the idea of literally keeping in touch seems much more relevant when getting or sending paper greeting cards.

With the norm being digital, there's specialness to exchanging paper greeting cards that seem to be reserved for people we are intimate with. And it is this kind of intimacy that paper greeting cards affords us that could not yet be replaced by digital communication.

It's keeping the tradition alive that will also keep paper greeting cards well in circulation even long after the digital medium fades in the background. So as the holidays approach, what better way to relive tradition and rekindle relationships than putting together one-of-a-kind greeting cards for Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year? If you start now, you will have a bundle to give away by the time the holidays roll around!