We just got our first Christmas card this week. For the record, it was a generic card, obviously from a generic box of cards, with a generic greeting, and (my personal favorite) a handwritten list of the names of the people in the family. That’s it. They’re alive. That’s all I know.

I’m so looking forward to the first family newsletter Christmas card. You know, the front-and-backer with a paragraph devoted to each family member (including the pets), and dark, blotchy photos that didn’t translate well from color to black-and-white when they ran off 200 copies at their local office products superstore.

I expect the HTML-based email message and link-to-web-page Christmas cards to be big this year. There are some advantages to these cyber-cards. Text I can read. Photos I can see. No trees falling in forests, not even recycled trees.

However, I’m dreading the joyful emails with links to web-based cards hosted by “insert-former-greeting-card-company-name-here”. Sure, I’ll go watch the flash animations with cute dogs, snow falling, and holiday music, hopeful of a heartfelt and informative message at the end.

So, how do you keep track of who sent you a holiday greeting each year and who didn’t? Who’s fallen off the face of the earth, and who just moved to the other side of town?

Here’s what I do. For every snail-mail Christmas card we receive, I quickly compare the envelope address with the one on file in our Mac’s Address Book. If it’s a newsletter greeting, I try to look over (overlook?) the body of the greeting for address, phone, or email information and enter any changes or additions in the Address Book as well.

Then, I place some simple text like “Christmas2006” - sorry, I don’t do “Xmas” - in the “Notes” field of the record of each person we got a card from. It doesn’t matter what you put in the Notes field, as long as it reminds you of “people I got a Christmas card from in 2006”.

So, when I go to make my list of people to send a card to next year, I can search for “Christmas2006” and get a list of everyone from this year. I can even set up a Smart Mailbox that gives me one-click access to the list.

Other address book programs like Now Contact allow for easy assignment of keywords that streamline the process, but the general idea is the same.

© 2006 Peter F. Zimowski