How Long Are You Supposed To Keep Birthday Cards?
By: Kae Smith
Tags: Minimalism, Sociology

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

How Long Are You Supposed To Keep Birthday Cards?

Asking for a friend

That’s a lie, I’m asking for myself. As I write, edit, and submit this, there are four (4) days remaining until my twenty-second (22) birthday and I have received three (3) paper birthdays cards by mail.

I’m actually pretty excited I got mail. I love getting mail, especially since moving to the coast. I love being able to spend the time digesting the words, being able to read and reread with no pressure to response back immediately. I love getting mail — I just don’t really know what to do with it.

I’m not a sentimental person. I don’t have the type of detachment that some people do — like those people who go through and delete all their text threads, whats up with those guys? — but I don’t tend to hold onto things that don’t serve some type of purpose.

So there lies a sensitive question: how long are you supposed to hold onto kind and thoughtful correspondence?

They’re nice and beautiful and have kindly written paragraphs in them and sometimes they deliver cheques but then what am I supposed to do with them? Right now they’re stacked in a pile on my kitchen counter, just staring at me as I make coffee.

I always remembered my mom stacking cards on the mantle like trophies. Look how many people wrote to us.

Not for me, thanks.

I feel like it is disrespectful, though. The stack of ripped open envelopes, handwritten cards, a cheque places on top (so I don’t forget to deposit it). It’s like I’m saying that I don’t care about them,

The sentiment is so nice. I enjoy every moment of it. But how long do I need to keep them?

The Problem with Sentimentality

I think people hold onto things for too long. We’re too attached to traditions, too reliant on getting our motivation or emotion from things.

We hold onto glassware our grandmother left us because we think if we don’t, it makes us look bad. We keep boxes of old things “to look at later”.

Birthday cards fall into this category.

When I was moving to university, my mom went through all the things of mine she had kept, asking if I wanted to take anything with me when I moved. She had cards my friends had given me on my fourteenth birthday. Was it fun to look at them? Yeah, sure. But I recycled them afterwards.

I like to think of cards as really nice conversations. You don’t get to save everything that happened in your mind, but the feeling remains — strengthening a bond.

I’m not going to pin them up above my bed just so I can look at them every day.

So, How Long Are You Supposed To Keep Birthday Cards?

I have no idea. I’m making up the rules as I go.

My current plan is to keep all the ones I’ve received until the day of my birthday (then it’s my day, and I can do whatever I want, ha.)

So thank you for the card. I will read it, cherish it, and then throw it out. If you want to give me something that will stay with me longer, send me a text (My response time for the two are pretty much the same, so however you choose to contact me, you’ll be waiting a while).

Kae (that’s me!) writes out of the coast of BC with a degree in Sociology. Find more of her introspective thoughts and opinions about the world here: https://kaelsmith.medium.com/