The greeting card industry, soothsayers of sentimentality, predicted it long before the first frost: Christmas will look a lot like the Fourth of July this year. Make room, red and green; the new palette for the Christmas card is red, white and blue.
It seems natural that more holiday greeting cards would be draped in the flag -- Old Glory has stayed in season since September 2001. But so have messages of family, friendship and faith, which have also been translated into the art and verse available in this year's crop of holiday cards.
"Starting with the millennium, we've seen a rise in spirituality, angels and religious cards selling well," said Tina Benavides, executive director of card planning at American Greetings, the No. 2 cardmaker behind Hallmark.
With their rigorous and secret market-research methods, the busy elves in the greeting card industry (Hallmark dedicates about 100 employees to Christmas cards year-round) are supplying a slicker version of the tidings millions of Americans produce and send on their own every year.
An estimated 2 billion cards get exchanged during the holiday season, according to the Greeting Card Association. Among the families for whom it's a tradition, the Christmas -- or Kwanzaa or Hanukkah -- greeting expresses the spirit of the holidays more directly than the priciest presents. And for the recipients, the season's greetings contained inside are often more than a sentimental salutation.
Most Christmas card messages fall in these categories:
* Family Follies: Puns, rhymes and gags on household themes.
* Glossy Portrait: Warm sweat-ers, new haircuts, forced smiles.
* Over-Achievers: A promotion, a new house, six marathons and acceptance into an Ivy League school. In one family. In one year.
* All-Purpose Epitaph: Store-bought, possibly signed.
* Bad News: Read between the lines. It may deliver its message by not arriving at all.
Before evolving into these variations, the Christmas card began as an English tradition, appearing there first in 1846. Louis Prang, a German immigrant, inspired the practice in America in the 1870s. The finely designed and printed cards that came from his Boston plant were also the seed for today's $7.5 billion greeting card industry.
Today, technology supplies all the tools necessary to make cards. The sender, however, still has to muster the motivation to get them in the mail on time.
You can upload your digital address book and have Hallmark.com send out your cards for you. Or, for about $50 at the same site, you can buy card production software that lets you print on card stock at home.
By obtaining a membership at AmericanGreetings.com, you can choose card designs appropriate to Christmas or any calendar occasion, from boss's day to administrative professionals' day. Print them out at home and send them on their way.
There's also the all-digital greeting, which serves so well in last-minute situations. But how will an intangible e-card go over with families who like to display their cards on the mantle?
Manners maven Letitia Baldrige blanches at the very idea: "A card that you can hold in your hand, enjoy the texture, even enjoy the choice of stamp the sender put on it is far superior, in my opinion, to a cyberspace-generated one."
For those who are busy enough around the holidays, there's always the card store. And those who fail to get them in the mail until after the New Year should rest easy knowing card makers are thinking ahead. At Hallmark, they're in the planning stages for Christmas 2004.
John Jurgensen is a writer for The Hartford Courant, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.