When Care Enough To Send The Very Best....
(Free & One of a Kind)
I detest generic holiday greeting cards. In fact, if the truth be known, I despise the holiday bullshit all together. If it weren't for family and the fact that I have to maintain some level of normalcy as a parent, I would leave the country just before Thanksgiving starts and return just after New Year's Day.
Sadly, I cannot but I absolutely refuse to give Hallmark my money and support the corporate rape of artists everywhere. They can keep their high gloss, mass produced, generic representations of how one should feel about the holidays. I can create that myself and for almost free!
I think I have a pretty valid case as to why I DON'T care enough to send the "VERY BEST" from Hallmark. Hallmark is one of the very first corporations not only directly responsible for raping artists, but the over commercialization of Christmas. Christmas, which everyone who has done their homework knows, is a charade orchestrated by the Roman Catholic Church to snuff out Paganism.
I feel like I should elaborate on my knowledge about Hallmark because what most people don't know about me is that I collect Hallmark antiquities-- more specifically, vintage greeting cards. When I was a child, my great grandmother had this beautiful hand crafted box bequeathed to her, that was full of Victorian and pre-Victorian postcards and such. Many of these greeting cards included early Hallmarks because my great grandmother took up the tradition of saving just about every card she had ever received from 1920 until present.The artwork and quality of these postcards/greeting cards were incredible. Absolutely nothing like the mass produced shit (and I do mean shit!) that Hallmark rolls off the press today.
Hallmark was just a simple postcard business that started around 1910 and was founded by a guy named Joyce C. Hall. The business name was half inspired by his last name and most fittingly, the hallmark stamps found on coins, precious metals, jewelry, silverware etc.,. Hall was deeply motivated by the 1903 postcard craze, at only 18 years old he set up shop and created simple picture postcards with his brothers, Rollie Hall (and later on, William Hall). Hall had an ingenious idea to turn postcards into more discrete greetings; he recognized that a lot of people didn't have a propensity or education for conveying thoughts through writing letters.
(hand drawn and painted by Joyce C. Hall)
1920's Hallmark Holiday Greeting Card
In 1914 Hall Brothers bought a small press and began publishing their own
line of Christmas cards. In 1915 a fire destroyed the company’s
entire inventory, putting it $17,000 in debt, but Joyce and Rollie Hall
rebuilt the business. In 1921 they were joined by their brother William
Hall. By 1922 Hall Brothers had recovered to the point where it was
employing 120 people, including salespeople in all 48 states. Hallmark didn't just wholesale the greeting card industry, they dominated it and expanded upon it.
Over the next two decades, the company would attack its market aggressively through advertising. In 1928 Hall Brothers became the first greeting card company to advertise nationally when it took out an ad in Ladies’ Home Journal. In 1936, with the national economy emerging from the worst of the Great Depression, Hall Brothers went on the attack again, introducing an open display fixture for greeting cards and sponsoring "Tony Won’s Radio Scrapbook” on WMAQ radio in Chicago. The advertising campaign was successful and gained the interest of Walt Disney, landing Hallmark their first licensing deal in 1932, which granted them the right to use Walt Disney characters on their products.
(Est. Value $3-5,000)
Now, fast forward to present day. Hallmark is a $4.4 billion dollar business with greeting cards and other products sold in 38,000 retail stores across the U.S. and in 100 countries worldwide. Hallmark publishes cards in more than 30 languages and distributes them in more than 100 countries. That means that your "very best" isn't very unique or special because half of the planet probably shares that crappy Mother's Day card you sent dear old Ma and chances are, she is going to toss that baby straight in the trash after reading it (unless she is a hoarder, pack rat, or collector such as myself)
Now, if cards aren't enough, just remember that Hallmark also makes stationery, party goods, gift wrap, photo albums, cut flower arrangements, home decor, collectibles, books, and Christmas ornaments. In the late 1990s, the company acquired several specialized greeting card companies that operate as subsidiaries, including DaySpring Cards, Inc., the leader in Christian personal expression products; Sunrise Greetings, producer and distributor of warm, sophisticated greeting cards; Sunrise Greetings line and the humor card line Weiner-Dog; William Arthur, which offers customized holiday cards, wedding invitations, fine stationery, and other high-end products and Image Arts, which specializes in discount cards and boxed holiday cards for mass retailers and deep-discount stores. Other acquisition included U.K.-based Creative Publishing, Editions DALIX of France, and the U.S. firm InterArt. Not to mention, they obtained licensing (1992) to include the use of Harry Potter, Dr. Seuss, Barbie, Winnie the Pooh, Looney Tunes, Blue’s Clues, and Batman. To put it bluntly,you could call Hallmark a monopoly.
If you aren't an artist already employed by Hallmark, creating mass produced work that they don't give you credit for, just remember that they are still going to give it to you up the ass without lube, every time you buy art supplies for yourself or your kids. Hallmark’s Crayola, LLC, subsidiary (formerly known as Binney & Smith Inc.) specializes in personal skill development products, including Crayola crayons, Magic Markers, Silly Putty art materials, creativity software, model kits, and art supplies for professionals and students.
In 1994, RHI Entertainment, Inc., is purchased by Hallmark and later in 2001, Odyssey channel is relaunched as the Hallmark Channel. Hallmark now has a firm stake in the media, effectively raping consumers with their non-stop holiday advertising campaign. They can even make their own bullshit movies to compel you to spend more! It gets even better. Naturally, Hallmark has it's own stock (Crown Media Holdings, Inc.,) but they also have a frequent-buyer reward program for customers, which means they can issue lines of credit to buyers.
It's pretty amazing and a bit scary, to think that one guy, who started out with simple pictures and putting his art on cards to sell to the public could turn a simple idea like that into a multibillion dollar corporate cluster fuck. But then again, this guy also made post cards:
Adolf Hitler Postcard Paintings
(Est. value $35,000 per-postcard)
When I care enough to send the very best, it will definitely be my personal best. Obviously I don't have what it takes to dominate the industry standard but at least I didn't get rejected from art school and haven't gone on to commit horrific acts of genocide. I doubt my work will be worth much more than the paper it's printed on but it's not guaranteed to be authentically Miracle.
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