Christmas Cards and the Color of Choice

 

A Christmas tree always makes me smile.  I enjoy decking the halls and planning Christmas dinner.  I love seeing packages under the tree but hate unwrapping them.  But when it comes down to it, Christmas cards are my favorite part of the holiday season.  I look forward to picking them out for others and I eagerly anticipate getting them from friends, and family, even businesses and charities.  When it comes to cards, I am an equal opportunity receiver.  But, since they get so much attention from me, and because my mind works in this way, years ago, I started noticing patterns. 

It turns out that there is a yearly tendency to prefer one color over another in Christmas cards.  There is always the usual array of Nativity scenes, snowmen, decorated trees, wreaths, birds and cute animals, but all of these exist on a background of various colors.  There are borders, ribbons, and nebulous splashes of color that predominate in a way that gives an impression of one general color.  Several years ago, I noticed that there was always one color which would find itself into most of the cards I received and gave.

While you might think that red would be a constant (it frequently is), blue, the color of advent, is another favorite.  Green, with its calm congeniality makes a regular appearance.  Pink, believe it or not, shows up in the odd year, but when it does, it is everywhere.  Yellow seldom appears, but silver and gold (both separately and in combination) have been frequent themes.  Rarely, and this year is one of them, brown or muted, rusty, earthy oranges are a constant.  Even when friends send a collection of family pictures they will be on a brown or less saturated orange background.  [“Saturation” in color means how intense the color is.  A less saturated color will be more grayed, a muted color.  A more saturated color will be deeper in hue.  It is the difference between a khaki green and a Kelley green.]

Why brown or browned out oranges?  Why this year?  Is there a psychology to color?  Yes, there certainly is.  Some of our psychological reaction to color is culturally bound, some is hard-wired.  But our reaction to color is predictable. 

Brown clothing makes one seem dependable and trustworthy, even rugged.  But browns and grayed colors can also make us sad or somber.  Brown promotes feelings of resilience, dependability and security.  It is also associated with loneliness, sadness and isolation.  Brown can make us feel stark and empty or warm and safe.  Brown is a color of contrasts.  It is a color of two minds.  It is many things to many people and our feelings toward it can run from safe to unsettled.  Brown is the color of our times.  I am certain that many people thought they were picking out a Christmas card when what they were really doing was holding up a mirror to a difficult and testing year. 

But why they gravitated toward a certain card is only part of the picture.  These people were choosing to select, buy, write a note and send a Christmas card.  Regardless of how their psyche was playing with them, every person who bought a Christmas card was celebrating the season.  They were choosing normalcy…tradition…a Christmas season in the middle of everything and in spite of everything.  There is hope in that.  There is feisty resilience in that.  There is determination in that. Perhaps this is the season of light after all. 

I keep the faith.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Generation of Serfs

  On October 25, 1415, Henry V of England laid some serious hurt on the French at the Battle of Agincourt at Pas-de-Calais, France.   Part of the success of this campaign was due to Henry’s use of the longbow, but part of it also goes to the creative use of military indentures.   These legal contracts required all the English captains to provide specified amounts of men, material and time to the King’s cause.             An indenture was a document, written in duplicate and then torn along a jagged line, like little teeth ( dents ), in the paper.   One portion of the contract was in possession of each party and when the required conditions and period of service were fulfilled, the parts reunited, and the debt was considered paid.   Many of the people who first came to this country from England came as indentured servants, worked off their debt and became the backbone of the country.             Today we are creating a nation not of indentured servants, someone with a carefully
Read more

Our Beautiful Constitution and its Ugly Opponents

 The Constitution is our anchor of stability in a turbulent world!   We can withstand a bad President and a petulant Congress (for the short term, at least) because our Constitution both guides and limits.   If someone asked me to provide proof of a loving God, I would simply ask them how else so many geniuses in the matter of human governance could have been clustered together in the right time and place to create both our country and the means to govern it.    Our founding fathers had the vision to devise a way to not only govern themselves, but govern a country that they could not imagine, yet believed would prevail. The constitution of the United States is like a good parent.   It has allowed us to grow up as we have grown older, with the result that the United States of America is the oldest living democracy in the world.   The miracle of this document is that it lives, breathes and moves with the times.   The three branches of our government work together while standing alone
Read more

"You Didn't Build That:" Part I

Late in the day on Friday, July 13 th , President Obama mounted the stage of Historic Firehouse Number One in Roanoke , Virginia .   The room held around 800 people but it was hot and several people fainted.   In front of a carefully screened group of supporters he gave one of the most important speeches of his reelection campaign.    It was not meant to be a major speech.   That will come in the even more carefully scripted Convention Hall in Charlotte , North Carolina this September in front of adoring media and rabid political supporters.   But this speech in Roanoke is crucial to the 2012 election because on Friday, in Virginia , President Obama went off message.   Whether through error or hubris, he abandoned his script and spoke off the cuff.   And in so doing, he showed us the man behind the curtain.   The angry but controlled, insecure yet charismatic, market fearful, socialistically inclined man that Barrack Obama really is. I am speaking, of course, of the now famou
Read more