I just recently read one of those online sayings that nowadays are often accompanied by startling images of landscapes or people and I’ve just realized they are really the modern version of our Hallmark cards of old. You know, those cutesy greeting cards we used to give our family members, friends and crushes in high school for special occasions like birthdays, Christmas and Valentine’s.
While these once-popular greeting cards might have debatably been replaced by other cards from different brands that we now see on shelves in a few book shops, the Hallmark tag was just a catch-all, generic name for all those greeting cards in general.
It is actually the practice of handing them out that seems to have been completely replaced by the variety that could easily be transmitted via the online highway. I have actually heard of sentimental swoons from some lady friends that it’s always preferable to receive these old tangible types of greetings in favor of the digital kind because they exude a more personal kind of reaching out. In those days of the boomer and the next generation, giving the cards was also a chance for a face-to-face encounter which is a far cry from today’s screen-only convos. There are others who then insist that it’s more romantic and intimate. For the super-sensitive mutants out there, they even attest (and swear to Odin) that they can detect the slightest fragrance of the one who signed the card, and feel their aura (putting eyes roll meme here).
So still, eye roll or not, the sad truth is that, father time rolls on people, whether we like it or not and the call of the new will totally drown out that of the old. The times they are a-changing, as Bobby D. Iikes to say.
Now going back to where all these started in the first place, the online saying I read went like this:
“Never blame anyone in life,
The good people give you happiness,
The worst people give you a lesson,
and the best people give you memories.”
In a nutshell, it hints at telling us to be kind which I hope we can all take with us on through twenty-twenty-two. On second thought, that particular saying would have made great Hallmark card, wouldn’t it? If only card-making people of the past could’ve read it, I’m certain they’d say ‘why didn’t I think of that!’
No matter, hallmark or not, the important thing is that, each time, the message still gets across. So, while the internet hums its approval, our having truly gone a long way, from those quaint greeting cards up to their digital counterparts, amounts to nothing because we might have just upgraded the means at delivery and that’s as far as it goes. Think about it, if the Hallmark card of the past had said ‘be kind’ and then we encounter the same message again online, then it’s definitely not about the message. Wouldn’t that at least, say something about us instead?
