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Every year I hear someone comment on how they stopped sending Christmas cards.

Now we see articles encouraging us to send e-cards instead.

Most people who know me, have heard me comment more than once, on how much I despise social media.

It draws you in and before you know it, hours of your life are gone to never be reclaimed again.

All the while trying to convince you to play “Keep Up With The Joneses.” You know the game… they have this, so you must have that, in order to keep up with the appearance of the ‘perfect’ life.

Never will you see the real-life arguments concerning the mounting pile of debt involved in the “Keeping Up” game.

Oh they LOOK so happy, but appearances are deceiving and we are not supposed to judge a book by its cover.

And for goodness’ sake, stop judging your day of missed deadlines and one disaster after another with their picture of perfection on some social media post. It is all a matter of perception and you are perceiving it based on your mood or how your day is going.

But this all brings me back to Christmas cards.

Again, I receive a story pitch on ditching Christmas cards and to send e cards instead.

“Most people now have a mobile phone or an email address, so why not send some e-cards this year instead?”

Let me count the reasons for why you should not send me an ecard:

I will delete the email. Seriously, 99.9% of the time, I do not even open the email. Straight to the trash it goes. At one time, I read each one of them. Then I realized there were no personal messages in them, just generic Happy [insert holiday, special occasion here]. So now I just delete them.

Most of the ecards are from some outside source, so the email address is not in my contact list. So, they end up in the infamous spam folder. Spam folders generally automatically delete emails after 30 days. I have been known to delete the contents weekly.

I do understand postage can get expensive when sending out a stack of cards. Not to mention I had all of mine get lost one year and delivered in April. It did create some good laughs as I joked I was trying to be ahead for the upcoming holidays.

Even I am more selective on who I mail one too and some I save to hand to them when I see them during the season.

I do miss the days when I used the cards received as part of my Christmas decorations. One year, we used them to decorate our tree. We could not see the lights or garland on the tree from the number of cards. Now we get a small handful.

For some, an ecard is the perfect way to send or receive a card. For me, it takes the personal touch from the thought of why you selected them to send a card.

Maybe, moving forward, we should consider adding that personal touch to the cards sent, hardcopy or electronically.

Dawn Burleigh is general manager and editor of The Orange Leader. She can be reached at dawn.burleigh@orangeleader.com