Hallmark Says 'It's OK to Love Today'

The Christmas season -- a beautiful time of the year when people get together and tell each other how much they care, usually in the form of some mutual exchange of consumer items. And admittedly, the Christmas season has come and gone, but who's to say I can't talk about it anyway?

Christmas is not just for the infamous convert-a-holic faith anymore -- no, these days, the Christmas season is about as secular as red wine in a box and a fistful of uprooted daisies. Hell, even the U.S. Supreme Court says Christmas trees are perfectly OK in the classroom -- and this is the same court that says prayer in schools is a big no-no.

Christmas is the ultimate crunch time, with all the shopping, gift-giving, decorating and church-going. Sure, a small percentage of people get everything out of the way early, namely shopping.

But who cares? Not long ago, a small percentage of people thought Jesus had come back to Earth, and now we're all better for it because we can say confidently, "Yes, there is a town in Texas named Waco."

Christmas is also a great time to buy a $5 card that begs the question: Do we feel that expressions of love are best saved for allotted holidays and therefore awkward on any other day?

It's a great time for the canned Hallmark greeting because, well, Americans are just too damn busy to come up with heartfelt one-liners on their own, like "Wishing You and Yours The Happiest of Holidays!"

What poor sap couldn't come up with this on his own but rather decided that his $5 was best spent buying a card that held this lame message?

Certainly, the complete jackmo who bought this card was not only spending 100 percent of his time trying to put Martha Stewart to shame, but he was obviously unable to take five seconds and sit down and come up with a simplistic greeting that would've impressed your kindergarten teacher. Maybe.

This guy could probably drop the same $5 on a 12-pack of Milwaukee's Best, write a better message and enjoy what I would consider to be the true champagne of beers.

The true mark of the degradation of human society is the Christmas card.

Its creation has occurred recently (within the last 200 years) and when you flip cards over the main culprit is neatly printed -- Hallmark.

Arguing about the hypocrisy of Hallmark's canned messages is old news -- people, both informed and ignorant, Democrat and Republican, can spout off on how gosh-darn corporate holidays have become.

By letting Hallmark decide how and when to tell loved ones that we care about them, we have thrown our hands up in the air and blurted out without remorse, "I don't have the time or initiative to be creative -- do it for me!" The Christmas card is a convenient "creativity in a can" concoction that is our supposed saving grace.

What is so sacred about corporate holidays that we feel we must limit ourselves to our capitalist-driven lives and let similarly capitalist-driven corporations set aside days to celebrate everything we don't have time for? These are days to look someone in the eye and tell him or her "I love you" while holding a $75 bouquet of roses, de-thorned of course, on the way to a blockbuster movie about a retarded dad in the midst of a child custody battle.

Maybe we feel that if we don't limit our niceties to the holidays, then they will become moot, meaningless and tragically cliched.

Therefore, that sparks the downward cultural spiral putting us on the bottom of the just-how-meaningful-is-human-society-anyhow scale, which is where we are anyway. What do we have to lose by exchanging gifts on July 19 or writing letters to our good friends on March 24 or wishing each other the best on Oct. 4?

Life is becoming an existence of convenience -- we have replaced the important parts of our lives with our 9-to-5 capitalist output.

But this is nothing new. So next time, screw the holiday -- or don't -- and instead try writing a letter to someone for the simple reason of saying hello, and trust in the fact that you are better at expressing your feelings than Jeremy Rodermond, the Hallmark Greeting associate and wordsmith.

Eugene Kim is searching for just the right words to say "Merry MLK Day." Send him your messages-in-a-can to

chinook@email.unc.edu.