The first one shows at your door up right after Thanksgiving (sometimes before, and you’ve gotta wonder about that). The last one sneaks in just before the Super Bowl. You guessed it – I’m talking about Christmas cards. If you’re offended by that term, please insert “Holiday Greeting” where you see “Christmas card”.

Christmas cards have evolved alongside technology. Heart-felt, handwritten (with great carpal pain) descriptions of the year’s events on each card gave way to the typed and copied family “newsletter”. With the Internet came email, HTML email with images and MIDI Christmas carols (AARGH!), PDF newsletter attachments, links to family web pages, and links to Flash-based animated greeting cards with cute retreivers.

The one constant in what some would call a relentless march to bad taste is the updating of information that takes place in the Christmas card exchange process. Births, deaths, moves, jobs, new cell phones, new email, etc. Here’s a tip to keep up with who moved where, who ditched their spam-filled email address, or who did-or-didn’t send you a card this year.

The process begins as you’re opening the card. Be careful not to tear through the return address, whether it’s located on the front or back of the envelope. Sometime later, before I throw away the envelope and card, I open my computer’s contact manager, and compare the new data with the old. That’s pretty straightforward.

The other thing I do is record the fact that I got a card from them this year, which also serves to tell me that the information for them in my contact manager is correct. How you do this depends somewhat on the features and capabilities of your contact manager.

For example, I use Now Contact as my primary contact manager. In Now Contact I can assign a customizable keyword to each record. I create a “Christmas 2005” keyword, and assign it to each record I update as the result of a received Christmas card. I can then easily search for all the records with that keyword when I go to prepare my cards next year.

Apple’s Address Book and Windows’ Outlook Express don’t do keywords, but you can accomplish the same thing by placing a phrase like “Christmas 2005” in the “Note” or “Other” data fields (faster if you cut-and-paste).

So, here’s hoping you and yours have a wonderful holiday and a healthy and prosperous New Year!

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski