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kottke.org posts about greeting cards

Full Moon Haiku Cards

Since May, I’ve been collaborating with a friend of mine, Barry Kuhar, to make “Full Moon Haiku Cards,” themed for each month’s full moon. He writes a haiku (or a haiku-inspired poem) for the inside, I draw the cover, and we sell them at a local restaurant. When the cycle is finished, we plan to offer them as a full set. (Thirteen cards, including the Blue Moon.) On January 25, if all goes according to plan, we’ll be reading from/showing the cards at the Rensselaerville Library, in case anyone is in the area (upstate NY).

I wanted to share the covers and poems because I love them, but also to recommend the act of just getting your own (or your kids’) drawings printed on cards, because it’s really easy and fun. I get the moon cards printed at Albany’s Modern Press, but I’ve also had good experiences using the online services Moo and Smartpress.

Barry and I still have a few more to go (coming up are the Wolf, Snow, Worm, and Pink Moons, before we’re back at the Flower Moon), but here’s what we’ve got so far:

moons-kottke.jpg

The finished cards end up looking like this:
samplebarryezcard.jpg

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The anxiety of Father’s Day cards

All greeting cards are bad, but can we agree that Father’s Day cards are particularly bad?

Cards for dads are a lot like T-shirts for toddlers: aggressively, relentlessly gendered. It’s telling many of the sports-themed cards look like wallpaper you might find in a child’s bedroom. As it turns out, the blue-is-for-boys, pink-is-for-girls anxiety doesn’t end in childhood. Now it’s beer-is-for-dads, wine-is-for-moms. To that end, Mother’s Day cards aren’t much better โ€” hope you like flowers! โ€” but there’s something striking about cards for dads, as though they exist to remind dads they are Manly Men Who Like Things For Manly Men, As Randomly Determined By Popular Culture.

A greeting card is a strange commercial product for lots of reasons, not least because of agency problems. By definition, the person buying a card is pretty much never the person whom it’s for. Add in whatever traditions are associated with the occasion, gaps in power or familiarity between the gifter and giftee, and it’s practically a recipe for people to tighten up and go super-conservative.

This does remind me of a thread in the webcomic Achewood where Roast Beef is inspired to create his own line of greeting cards for everyday occasions. By the end, he and his friend Ray are coming up with “Dude-to-Dude” cards like “Dogg Let’s Go Eat Dishes With Chorizo When Our Ladies Aren’t Around” or “Dogg It Must Feel Sick As Hell To Recieve A Card From A Dude.” (If I were to ever receive either of these cards from my son for Father’s Day, I’d be thrilled.)