At this age, a mature gesture is in the cards

This month, much to my surprise, I achieved an important life milestone. I sent out my first batch of holiday cards.

As once-basic milestones like homeownership or childbirth stretch out of reach for my generation of sub-40 Americans, smaller gestures take on a larger importance. And when you think about it, a holiday card is a weighty thing these days.

Sending out a batch of holiday cards suggests that you possess a remarkable level of organization. The address book is a thing of the past — jeez, the act of having any phone numbers memorized, besides your own, is a thing of the past.

So sending out holiday cards suggests that you managed to not only wrangle a list of mailing addresses from your nearest and dearest, but you managed to hang onto that list long enough to enter it on a spreadsheet.

Then there’s the content of the card itself.

I’ve never received a handwritten card from anyone under the age of 50. For some time, people were sending holiday cards enclosed with printed letters, which breathlessly described the family’s

magnificent triumphs over the past year. Now that we have Facebook, we can roll our eyes at our friends’ relentlessly cheerful descriptions of their lives all year long. So those cards are (thankfully) passe.

These days, most holiday cards are printed with at least one beautiful photo of you with your happy smiling family. New to this? Well, you have to meet expectations, don’t you?

This is another way in which the holiday card is an important life milestone — it implies an acceptance, however grudging, of obligations.

A large part of the difficulty of holiday cards revolves around choosing that beautiful photo.

Casual iPhone shots and cute, off-the-cuff moments rarely work. Photo holiday cards are constructed online, and a host of specialized digital companies have sprung up to meet our needs. While they all have different marketing and different prices, they all seem to use the same rigid photography templates.

Many people book special photo shoots for their holiday cards. I guess that makes sense if you can reuse the photos on Instagram.

Isn’t it exhausting, just thinking about all of this work?

But I knew all of this, and I returned to my grudging acceptance of obligations — for this year, at least.

Over the years, I’ve received many beautiful holiday cards from people whom I love very much. For once, I was going to suck it up and return the favor.

Once I had the photo, then came the time to choose a digital card company capable of turning it into a holiday card.

It had to be paper, of course. Sending paper cards is what means you’ve achieved the milestone. Paper cards require taste, organization and an awareness of deadlines. Anyone can send a last-minute email of something dreadful from 123Greetings.

Still, I will fully admit that here is where I cut corners.

There are companies that create better cards than the one I picked: cards that boast better photo resolution, allow you to write special messages or arrive in ecologically friendly envelopes. If you have more patience than I did, try Minted or Artifact Uprising.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve received several of these cards from friends. I’ve opened them, fawned over them, and felt the pangs of envy that we all secretly want our friends to feel when they see our holiday cards.

Then I’ve flipped the envelopes over and seen the mailing labels. Instantly my feelings of envy have frozen into a shudder.

After taking and selecting a photo and wrangling addresses and squishing everything into a computer template, someone had to spend yet another evening of her life addressing labels and adding postage stamps. Nope. The main reason I chose the company I went with, Simply to Impress, was because it printed all of my envelopes and mailed my cards for me.

There’s obligation, and then there’s affliction.

Now that the cards are in the mail, I’ve taken a deep sigh and thought about a different milestone.

For there comes a time, and my older friends tell me it happens after the age of 50, when you stop sending out holiday cards altogether.

You just stop being willing to put in the time, they tell me. It feels bad at first, but slowly all of your friends stop doing it, too, and the whole holiday card exchange just ends.

They’re usually cheerful when they tell me this. I understand why — as you get older, you get to let go of obligations rather than assume them.

But, for now, the idea of getting no holiday cards still makes me sad. I’ve taken it as a sign to enjoy this milestone, headaches and all, while I’m there.

Paper cards require taste, organization and an awareness of deadlines. Anyone can send a last-minute email.