Wednesday 5 December 2018

'Tis the season

December has arrived, and Christmas cards have been coming in the mail. I have also been sending cards too, still more than a few yet to write and post. I am having some trouble finding Christmas cards I actually want to send. I still have some from previous years and I was able to buy more this year, but the problems I have are:

1) Many of the cards I come across are square. Not a problem for postage within the UK, but the smaller square cards suitable for posting domestically, fall foul of the minimum sizing for international mail.


I had posted in this blog in December 2016  about this, after I had sent a small square card out internationally.
The US has a non-machinable surcharge for square items of mail. I did wonder if Royal Mail would go down that route, but so far, they haven't....

2) Many cards also have glitter on. After the big fuss of Sir David Attenborough's nature series showing the amount of plastic in the ocean and killing off some creatures - even poisoning milk and killing little baby sea mammals.
Not all of the cards have glitter, and my camera hasn't made it easy for you to tell which cards here have glitter.
The designs look nice and I have bought glittery cards in the past before Blue Planet II. I still like the way glitter shines in the light and it would be very hard for me not to go Ooo about it. However, when buying new cards, I think I can restrain myself from getting glittery ones now.

3) Some of the sentiments inside are not what I want. I need both the wishes for Christmas and for the New Year. However, some just have Christmas wishes in. I do also like Season's Greetings as that can mean time-appropriate greetings. Although it can be a bit strange to send a winter scene to someone in the southern hemisphere. 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to one and all. 

2 comments:

  1. I'm not a fan of glitter and I really struggled to find any nice Christmas cards without glitter this year... In fact, I failed!

    I try to avoid the smaller cards as I'm always worried about them getting lost in the post.

    I'm afraid a few of my Christmas cards probably didn't arrive in time. I know at one point before Christmas some first class mail was taking at least a week to arrive!

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    Replies
    1. I don't mind the smaller cards as I can use them in letters to penpals.

      One of the square cards I sent abroad arrived but it had two postmarks on the front perhaps because the machinery didn't get it right-way up first time.

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