Do we need Christmas cards?

If you walk down the average high street or shopping centre in many places, there are always lots of card shops.   If you do the same in Spain you will not see card shops but shoe shops.  Wonderful for shoe-a-holics but not so good if you just want some nice cards for friends and family back home.

Most people have email but not all,  some would be quite happy with an email greeting, but somehow it seems very impersonal and a card - especially one chosen for a person rather than out of a box of 36 - seems better at this time of year.

Cards are very rare here,  surprisingly there are some quite nice ones sold in the local tabac, but not Xmas cards, nice cards in El Corte Ingles but a day in Granada seems a bit extreme just for some cards so imagine my delight when I saw some Xmas cards today in Ugijar.  OK, so I was in one of the bazaars - think Woolworths-ish,  everything you didn't know you needed at a very reasonable price.

10 cards for 75 cents. They do say that you get what you pay for and  I should have stopped at that point and not bought any but in fact I bought 2 packs.  When we opened them tonight we just started to laugh.  Cheap and tacky doesn't begin to describe them.  Bright and garish does. So flimsy that they don't stand up.  Thin paper - apparently photocopy paper is 80 gsm, these can't be much thicker than that.  John said if we glue them together to stop them bending we could  hang them up as decorations.....then we thought we could cut them up and use them as labels for presents.... maybe if we don't get any/many cards we can hang them up and pretend we still have cards sent to us.

So if you are reading this and expecting to get a card from us this Christmas,  sorry, but not this year. 

And back to my original question.  Do we need to send cards at all?  It's just as easy to pick up the phone and wish someone a merry Christmas, send a picture and a message to those who have email and in these days of austerity, much more economic, although I'm sure the post office won't agree with that!

PS - we had a bonus with our cards, someone can't count and one packet had 11 cards in it!