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Birthday Cards Are The Most Popular Greeting Card

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You remember all of those sometimes cute, sometimes funny, and sometimes downright obnoxious electronic cards that used to appear in your email inbox? Well, if you hadn’t guessed it, there’s actually a day devoted to electronic greetings. Fittingly, that day is known as Electronic Greetings Day.

Origin of Electronic Greetings Day
With technology growing to be an ever more important component of our day to day lives over the last few decades and the fact that it’s continuing to do so (no arguing – in all likelihood you’re reading this article on a computer, a smartphone, or a tablet), the advent of electronic greetings became inevitable. You might remember all of those e-cards back in the late 1990s when everyone in the US was just starting to have a personal computer at home – those may seem so dated now, with their low-resolution graphics and all, but in their day it was quite an exciting thing to get an animated greeting card in your email.

These days, things like Facebook stickers and other electronic greetings dominate the field, but the concept remains more or less unchanged. Electronic greetings are here to stay, and why not celebrate them with their own day? Since any mention of exactly when Electronic Greetings Day first occurred seems to be unavailable, we’re going to venture a guess and posit that the occasion was created by those websites which sell e-cards – most likely sometime between the late 1990s and mid-2000s.

Celebrating Electronic Greetings Day
Well, we’d assume that you’re already on a device connected to the internet if you’re reading this, and so it should be easy enough to go an electronic greeting card website and send a few animated cards to your friends and family right now. If you haven’t gotten any e-cards lately and would like to, then you might have to start the process and send a few yourself. It’s true that the genre may seem a bit dated, but if you think about it, those stickers that you can send in many instant messenger services (such as Facebook and Telegram) are a sort of more modern evolution of the same ideas. But e-cards are far from dead, and one can easily find websites with numerous different e-cards for any occasion. And if you’ve never sent anyone an e-card before in your life, then Electronic Greetings Day marks the perfect occasion to go ahead and do just that.

Greeting Card History

  • Humans have been sending greetings to each other for centuries, with the ancient Chinese and Egyptians sending messages to each other thousands of years ago.
  • Greeting cards can be divided into two categories: everyday and seasonal. The most popular everyday cards by far are birthday cards, which account for more than half of the sales in that category. The average American receives at least one birthday card a year.
  • As far as seasonal cards, the most received holiday greetings are Christmas cards. The second most popular holiday cards are for Valentine’s Day, followed by Mother’s and Father’s Day.
  • Greeting cards from local drugstores or grocery stores are typically priced below $5. Some of the most expensive greeting cards of all time come from a company called Gilded Age Greetings, whose prices for their handmade cards begin at around $395.
  • Gilded Age Greetings’ most expensive cards are made from silk and embroidered with real gold. The most costly is priced at $4,995.
  • Greeting cards sales are in the billions in the U.S., and the Greeting Card Association estimates that Americans spend around $8 billion on more than 6 million cards each year.
  • The first official Christmas card sent from the White House came from President Calvin Coolidge in 1927, according to the White House archives. Since then the White House has steadily increased the number of cards sent each year. President Eisenhower sent more Christmas cards than any other president at the time in 1953 to ambassadors, members of Congress and other foreign and local government officials. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have each sent millions of Christmas cards.

Sources:

Days of the Year

Cards Direct