Electronic Greetings Day

What the day is

Electronic Greetings Day is observed on November 29. It covers the whole category of greetings sent through a screen, which by now means very nearly all of them.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented.

The interesting change is not that greetings moved onto screens. It is that remembering became free. Birthdays, anniversaries and work milestones once required either memory or a calendar somebody maintained by hand, and the effort involved was part of what the greeting communicated. Platforms now supply the reminder and will frequently draft the message as well.

This has a predictable consequence. A signal carries information in proportion to what it costs to send. While remembering took effort, being remembered told you something specific about your place in another person's attention. A prompted greeting sent in two seconds cannot carry that information whatever its wording, which is why a wall of near-identical birthday messages reads as pleasant rather than moving.

The handwritten card survives for exactly this reason. Its advantages are its inefficiencies: it takes time, it costs money, it has to be chosen, addressed and posted in advance. Every one of those is a cost the recipient can read.

None of which makes electronic greetings worthless. Volume has its own value, and the ambient contact that messaging sustains between people who would otherwise drift apart entirely is real. The two forms do different jobs. The trouble starts when the cheap one gets used for an occasion that needed the expensive one.

How to take part

• Send greetings, and send more of them than you think strictly necessary.
• Write something only you could have written. One specific detail outperforms any amount of warmth.
• Turn off the suggested reply for anything that matters.
• Use the phone for the occasions that deserve an actual voice.
• Keep a handful of people on a list you maintain yourself, with no reminder attached.