The custom is younger and more commercial than it feels. Sir Henry Cole commissioned the first commercial Christmas card in London in 1843; two batches totalling 2,050 cards were printed and sold at a shilling each. Chromolithography industrialised it (by the 1880s the firm Prang was producing over five million cards a year), and Hallmark, founded in 1913, built a business on the idea that a posted card was the polite minimum, helped along by wartime demand for cards sent to soldiers. Volumes have been falling for decades. The estimated number of cards received by an American household dropped from 29 in 1987 to 20 in 2004, even though 1.9 billion cards were still sent in the US in 2005. That decline is the shape of the disagreement. For people who grew up when a posted card was the default way to stay in touch once a year, not sending one reads as a lapse. For people with cheaper and faster ways to do the same job, it is an expense and an afternoon of addressing envelopes.