This year when Dan and I moved in together, we invested in a Fujitsu ScanSnap which scans the front and back sides of stacks of paper of assorted sizes at a rate of 20 pages per minute. This enabled me to personally cut three and a half boxes of paper files down to one (leaving one only because there are a few items that really require retaining a paper copy–such as car titles and passports). Now I can visually browse my files on my computer in a fraction of the time it would have taken me to look through the physical copies, especially if you count the time required to wrestle the file boxes out of their hiding places in the nooks and crannies of my home. One of the most satisfying elements of this scanning process was liberating myself from years and years of greeting cards without losing the personal messages they held.
In general, Christmas as an adult is fraught with waste. Companies often throw lavish parties when the money might have been better spent directly compensating employees; we overbuy fancy packaging in an attempt to demonstrate how much we value our family and friends; we are overwhelmed with the Christmas shopping spirit and acquire home decorations in excess or that are quickly supplanted in subsequent years by better ones; and we dutifully spend more recklessly than we ever would on ourselves–often having no idea what material object would optimize utility for a relative because it turns out that, logically, we are best at shopping for ourselves.
After all of this work of greatly cutting down the clutter in my life (clutter costs money), it feels hypocritical to send out a pile of personalized cards, no matter how much I’d love to dress Buster up in antlers for a family photo that would be displayed on all my friends’ refrigerators until they are faced with the inevitable dilemma of eternally storing said memento or disposing of it with a heavy heart after the holidays. So this year my cards must be electronic. Honestly, I don’t really want anyone to see my writing on non-lined paper anyway. The only thing is that I don’t want my recipients to have to go to a web site to view the card (usually meaning they need to log in or can’t save it) but I also want my messages to be more (tastefully) festive than an ordinary email. Oh, and I don’t plan on paying much of anything since the only product I would be consuming is art. I have been looking for customizable pdfs that could be included as an attachment to an email, but this does not seem to exist.
The closest I have found were the printable pdf cards that Dwell created last year (see here and here), but unfortunately Dwell took down the site! These cards aren’t even perfect because they are really laid out to be printed, not emailed, but I probably could have modified them or maybe wouldn’t have cared. No one has filled this niche–why? I don’t want to pay much, but I would pay for a template. Yes, I could design one myself but I didn’t think of this early enough and don’t really feel like spending the time nor do I have the right software on hand to do a good job. This seems like the obvious correct way to send greeting cards in the future, but no one’s doing it (qualifier: based upon my quick internet searches).
On a related green Christmas note, I was very happy to read that someone’s finally offering live potted Christmas trees. Before I started getting very small trees which are cheaper (so less money is thrown out when the season is over) and easier to transport into and out of the apartment, I was looking for something like this. The closest thing I ever found was Friends of the Urban Forest‘s service, but they bring you conifers that are decidedly un-cone shaped which will later be planted in city streets where they serve a higher purpose than most cut pine trees sitting on a lot could have ever imagined.
Filed under: Sustainability
[...] Posted on February 7, 2010 by sfurbanist Back in December, I lamented that I could not find tasteful, contemporary, and inexpensive electronic Christmas [...]