Season's Geetings

B and I try to send out a card or picture each year to wish happy holidays to our friends and family.

A quick check on my previous posts seems to confirm that I haven't previously posted about the differences in English and French holiday cards.

First off, stores don't really sell packs of 20 Christmas cards. I've only found packs of 5 or 8 cards, so you have to buy several, which can be expensive depending on how nice they are and if they are post card style or greeting card style.

Second, I discovered long ago that there are no "Christmas" cards. Many French cards have a Christmas tree on them, or ornaments, or a snowman, or other Christmas images, but they never wish "Joyeux Noël", only "Meilleurs Voeux" or "Bon Année" (Best Wishes/Happy New Year). Initially this bugged me a bit, but now I just consider it a reason it's okay to get my greeting card act together after Christmas.

This difference in Merry Christmas vs Happy New Year actually confused my mom for a while. My husband's family sent my parents some cards, but since they didn't receive one in return they weren't sure it arrived. When I called my mom to ask if they had indeed received something, she responded "Yes, but it was a Happy New Year card, not a Christmas card, so I thought I wasn't supposed to respond."

My last comment is not restricted to greeting cards, but only seems to be an issue for me around this time of the year: buy only the 'carnet' of colored stamps with "à validité permanente" on the back of the sticker sheet. A few years ago I wanted to send my cards to the States with pretty "philatélie" (collectable) stamps. The problem is that they have the value written on them and next year when you want to use them again, they aren't the right postage. I have 65¢ stamps with a pretty deer on them, but First class in France is 60¢, European Union is 77¢ and the rest of the world is 89¢. I have some 10¢ stamps I bought to make up the difference (when Europe was probably 75¢), but now those don't quite work either. I might have to buy some 2¢ stamps to use them for letters in Europe, for a total of 3 stamps on one envelope (65 + 10 + 2).

With that, I'm back to preparing the cards we ordered through Apple with pictures from the last year.