Design: Mirroring American Taste

Christmas cards tell us religion is up, but Santa is down

The Christmas cards we put on our mantels and tuck in our Venetian blinds are not just greetings from relatives, friends, would-be friends and dry cleaners. They are mirrors of American culture—the neighborly and the utopian, the tacky and the cutesie, the schmaltzy and the smutty, the corny and the phony, the humorous and the sentimental. Lately there are also some fresh and appealing designs, as well as good art, old and new.

The reflections are accurate. The greeting card industry, displaying its products on open racks, has developed an inventory system that keeps a close tab on the public’s likes and dislikes. Greeting card publishers carefully test their designs before they are put on the market. Christmas cards in effect are produced on demand.

All of this dogged marketing research and the mass production that follows stifle adventure and artistic convictions. The manufacturers and designers of many things we need or would like to have—automobiles, furnishings, greeting cards—keep asking us what we want. And what we want is what we get. Designers design in a mirror and so lock our society in a hall of mirrors. There is no advance into ideas we do not know about. This method of operation has ruined Detroit. Foreign car manufacturers were more adventurous and gave us designs we never knew we wanted.

We do know we want more religion in our Christmas greetings. According to the industry, the demand for religious cards has sharply increased in the past ten years. They now constitute from 25% to 30% of the 3 billion Christmas cards that will be sold this year by Hallmark, which claims the largest share of the Christmas market. While religion is in, Santa seems to be ho-ho-ho-ing himself out of popular favor. He has been getting silly and vulgar lately, so good riddance.

Nostalgia is up, conveying everything from Early American to the 1950s. A card depicting a 40-year-old trolley car diner could be one of this year’s bestsellers. The superbestseller, surpassing all other artists, remains Nostalgia-Monger Norman Rockwell. (A favorite is a horrified Junior watching Santa dropping his beard as he kisses Mom and thus reveals himself as Dad.)

There is cheer for the country’s mayors: the number of Christmasy cityscapes has sharply increased. Interest in Oriental designs is growing. As T shirts and bumper stickers have shown us, Americans like to advertise their ideological beliefs on their cards. The word peace, blandly presented with and without political or religious symbolism, continues to ring loud and clear on this year’s messages. (Miss Piggy cards keep inspiring us to “grab for all the goodies you can get!”) The average buyer of 90% of all Christmas and holiday cards, reports the National Association of Greeting Card Publishers, is a 33-year-old woman. She buys an average of two boxes of 25 identical cards, plus a selection of ten different special cards “For a wonderful mother,” a “Very special friend,” teacher, preacher, sweetheart, darling, son, daughter and husband and every other possible target, imprinted with sentiments such as “Wishes for you . . . all the year through.” In recent years increasing numbers of cards have also been especially designed for blacks and Hispanics, featuring smiling black faces and Spanish inscriptions. Printed in full, deep colors on acetate, they tend toward solemn glossiness.

The design of all these conventional Christmas cards is—what? Let’s say, conventionally mediocre. They are as unaffected by contemporary art, technology and the world around us as traditionally styled dining rooms in roadside chain motels or Cinderella Rambler interiors.

There is no evidence of changing attitudes or values, of the switch from double martinis to white wine, canasta to video games and street cruisers to compacts.

The religious greetings often come in oversized, lined envelopes, replete with embossed gold and silver foil, foldouts, cutouts and illustrations that are not even close to the improving artistic quality of America’s liturgical art. The bells, holly, candles, poinsettias, angels and Christmas trees in this gaudy genre are the graphic equivalents of Silent Night, Holy Night blaring from the loudspeakers of a bargain basement.

What passes for cute rarely is. Puppies in Santa caps smack of Reddi-Wip sweetness. Some of the lyrical snow scenes look spray-painted with the stuff. Most humorous cards are slapstick. And from the kittens, puppies and piggies with red ribbons on their tails we progress to toilet tissue with Merry Christmas all over it. Six dollars for a pack of four. The kinky cards they sell in West Hollywood would make Linda Lovelace blush. Merry Christmas, indeed! Graphic Designer Massimo Vignelli says, “Like all floods, the flood of greeting cards has become a national disaster.”

No. A disaster it is not. One might argue that the more disastrous disaster is the gap between the highbrow snob appeal of such designers as Vignelli, Herb Lubalin or Frank DeVino and the middlebrow taste of Middle America. Few top designers are able to bridge that gulf with top design.

One first-rate designer, Ivan Chermayeff, has created outstanding Christmas card designs that are also big sellers, as if to prove that excellence need not be a handicap. Chermayeffs cards show simple themes, such as Christmas tree decorations, angels and even Santa, which everyone associates with Christmas. He presents them in jubilant colors in the manner of Matisse cutouts. His “Angel and Dove” has sold some 4 million copies, making it one of the world’s most wanted Christmas cards. Says Chermayeff: “My designs are carriers for what I believe Christmas should be all about—the delivery of personal messages. They are covers for personal greetings, for saying hello at a friendly time of the year.”

The American Artists Group, formed nearly 50 years ago, offers cards of well-known painters and designers, including Chermayeff, Stanford Brod and Vincent Hartgen. The group plans to reissue cards that feature the work of such artists as John Sloan and Grant Wood. The abstract avant-garde never got an ink blotch on this market. Says Artists Group President Martin Dash: “Christmas is romantic and friendly. Jackson Pollock paintings are not.”

As more shoppers are discovering, reproductions of old masters are another escape from the hall of mirrors. The Hallmark collection has included Raphael, Rembrandt and Botticelli. Museum shops are becoming more crowded—and enterprising—every season. Art reproductions somehow demand a personal message. The trend is toward handwritten notes either on Christmas cards or on special holiday stationery in Christmasy colors. Mimeographed family letters are going out of fashion. Christmas card lists are getting shorter. Increased postage undoubtedly has a bearing on this. In addition, more women have jobs and do not want to spend long hours sending cards to many of the same people they see day after day.

Despite the mirrors and the sham, the season’s greetings seem to become more personal and more meaningful. We may send fewer cards in the future, but we won’t stop sending them. President Reagan, for example, will send out 60,000 cards adorned with a reproduction of Jamie Wyeth’s Christmas Eve at the White House as his holiday greeting. As Martin Dash said, “You can’t decorate your tree or your mantel with a telephone call.” —By Wolf Von Eckardt. Reported by Dorothy Ferenbaugh/New York with other U.S. bureaus