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"  My Christmas cards are sitting in a bag inside my closet. Don&amp;#039;t bother looking for one in your mailbox this year. Or, very likely, any year. Twitter killed my Christmas cards, and I&amp;#039;m not sure that I care. The cards in my closet are actually from last Christmastime, when, upon sitting down to fill them out, I drew a blank. What do you say after a year of battling cancer? &amp;quot;Hello, friends and family. We&amp;#039;re not sure yet if the chemo and radiation worked or if I&amp;#039;m going to need a bone marrow transplant in January...Season&amp;#039;s Greetings!&amp;quot; So I put the cards away. But this year we know that the cancer treatments worked. I&amp;#039;m in remission, and I&amp;#039;ve got a curly mop of hair on my head. And yet, I still have no desire to fill out my cards. After a year&amp;#039;s worth of tweeting and blogging and uploading and sharing, simply writing &amp;quot;Happy Holidays&amp;quot; on a card, especially one designed by someone else, seems woefully inadequate. It seems so 20th century. And it appears that other folks feel the same way. We&amp;#039;ve received fewer holiday cards this year, though that might be a function of the down economy more than anything else. Or maybe people struck us off their lists last year after I quit sending Christmas cards. It&amp;#039;s hard to know. I mean, it&amp;#039;s not like they clicked &amp;quot;Stop following&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Remove from friends.&amp;quot; Snail mail is so one-way. All I know is that this year, I wrote more than 150 blog entries here, and another 200-plus others on my own web site I produced nearly 500 tweets on Twitter and I commented on other people&amp;#039;s blogs, tweets and status lines all year long. As a result, I feel like I&amp;#039;ve said pretty much all there is to say about 2008, some of it in just 140 characters. Meanwhile, I was friended or followed by all sorts of people, including my next door neighbor, a kid I went to summer camp with back in 1980 and my mother. And I followed and friended them back. I kept in touch all year long, not just in December. Though I appreciate the lovely holiday cards some folks have mailed to me, I read them and thought I know. I know because I saw their vacation photos on Facebook, and I read their funny tweets from their college reunions, and I caught up on their blogs. I know, because social media has made us all more, well, social - except, perhaps, when it comes to Christmas cards. So, in lieu of paper holiday cards delivered through rain, sleet or gloom of night by the U.S. Postal Service, I will wish everyone happy holidays in true Twitter fashion: @everyone Twitter killed my holiday cards, but not my spirit. So Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good byte! "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a22264/twitter-killed-my-christmas-cards/?src=shelter_footer>