I am working diligently on my holiday cards – hoping to get them out before the New Year hits (unlike last year). As more and more arrive in my mailbox, I always wonder – where are all of these people all year?

In the day and age of Twitter, Facebook, Eons, MySpace, Flickr and an abundance of other social networking communications, why do I still receive a random, once-a-year update from relatives that I don’t really know and friends I haven’t seen since high school? Not that I don’t appreciate the cards and love hearing about people’s lives, but … it makes me wonder, what is the point of holiday cards? If you really cared about me, couldn’t you connect with me all year long electronically? Is an email or Twitter “follow” considered more impersonal than a once-a-year card?

The ones that really crack me up are the narcissistic, one-sided holiday letters that arrive with some of the cards. Usually these are of two categories:

1) Completely one-sided, only the “great things” that happened all year like new kids/jobs/houses/cars, etc.

2) TMI – too much information about the less-than-pleasant happenings in life such as gall bladder surgery or Aunt Edna’s bankruptcy.

It seems strange to me in this day and age that – unless you’re 70 or older – people don’t make more of a commitment to stay in touch on a regular basis with family and “friends.” It makes me think that holiday cards from cousins who don’t really know me are one sided ways to show off. If you really wanted to keep in touch or even get to know me a bit better, you could easily do so by connecting with me over email or – even easier – on the aforementioned social networks. It makes me think that the not-so-personal “friends” I have on Facebook (i.e., those who “friend” me even though we’ve never met) might just know me better than the cousins with whom I used to share matching PJs as we grew up together.

Perhaps holiday cards should just be reserved for business – it’s a cordial, intelligent gesture to say “Happy New Year” and “Thanks” to those with whom we conduct not-too-personal parts of our life. But to do so to friends and family – and only that – seems a bit cold and shallow.

What do you think?