The impersonal touch of holiday greetings

The holiday season is over. It was a long one. Maybe not for you but for me it seemed endless. But there is something that jumped out at me this year (I guess technically it was last year) that never quite struck me before.

It’s one thing to see someone face to face and wish them a Merry Christmas and it’s another thing to get a phone call. There seems something so impersonal about not having someone reach out personally to you but simply post a message on their social media page wishing hundreds of people a happy holiday season.

Don’t get me wrong, I have about 13,000 followers on Twitter and I certainly wouldn’t have made the time to write to all of them but it made me wonder, “I have a lot of relatives that know my phone number yet I didn’t hear from them.”

Does it matter the kind of relationship you have with someone that dictates how they should contact you for certain things? Do you feel forgotten about if you don’t get that direct contact from someone who should be close to you?

I could easily be called a hypocrite because this year (last year) I purposely didn’t reach out to people offering well wishes just to see who would think to contact me first. It wasn’t depressing because people did get in touch personally but for those friends and family that took the impersonal route of thinking of social media before direct contact it kind of made me wonder.

This is probably more fuel to the fire when it comes to the debate about people having so many forms of communication yet as a society our communication skills seem to be getting worse.

It’s true what they say about people still appreciating a handwritten letter in the mail or something you can physically hold or hear being more meaningful.

In closing: remember that on Aug. 1 when my birthday rolls around!