Simplifying Holiday Greetings

Posted on December 3, 2008 by LJ

Wednesdays are simplicity days at SimpleProductivity blog.

Photo by Little Li Holiday communications are one of the most difficult for me to keep up with. I have a large extended (and not close) family, and friends scattered all over the world. Holiday greetings used to make me curl up my toes. But I refused, as some of my friends have done, to give up on the custom altogether. After all, it is the only link I have with some of these people.

Divide and Conquer

My first strategy is to decide what sort of communication is appropriate. For those people I see regularly, or that I keep in touch with via email, a simple greeting is fine. Others need more information.

I divide up my list into three groups: cards, email, and newsletter.

Card Recipients

The people I send cards to are those people who I am in touch with regularly, but who do not believe in email. This includes my parents, my in-laws and various older relatives.

Email Recipients

These people are the ones that I email regularly, or who I know check their email regularly. They don’t like the hassle of dealing with paper mail, or like the green advantage of electronic communication.

Newsletter Recipients

This group are the extended relatives that I may or may not have seen in the past year. They will generally need to be brought up to speed on the events in our lives. However, I do not believe in sending out a one-size-fits-all letter.

Handling Greetings

Labels

I use labels for all correspondence. Thanks to Word and mail merge, I can quickly print out sheets of labels. The Post Office seems to do better with these, too, rather than my chicken-scratch handwriting.

Email

I extract email addresses from the PDA program, and can paste them quickly into my email greeting cards. I use American Greetings for both print and email cards, and I can set up the holiday email well in advance, and they will send it out at the proper time.

Letters

As I mentioned Monday, I do a personalized mailing to the people who get letters. More details can be found in the ebook, Creating Personalized Holiday Letters.

Simplifying Greetings = Less Stress

I used to hate doing greetings. But in the three years that I have followed the strategy I outlined above, I have cut our costs, halved my effort, and felt good about this yearly communication.

Photo by Little Li

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