The sweet returns of card making

BUYING and sending greeting cards is like a treasured memory, now that there are phone calls, ecards, short messages and video messages.
Ask anyone below the age of 15 whether he has sent a greeting card and you will feel like a dinosaur when he says: "Who sends cards these days?"

Although the occasional card still arrives in the mail, what we generally find in our postbox these days are bills and junk mail. Gone are the days when we eagerly waited for the postman to arrive on his red bicycle to hand over to us, personally, postcards, birthday cards or festive cards.
We bought cards for all occasions, hand wrote the details and penned them off with warmest regards. For those whom we were particularly fond of, we enclosed little mementos. Then we cycled or walked to the nearest post office to buy stamps of different denominations. We selected the stamps with care, especially if the stamps came in a sequence.

I have just joined a ladies' group and our last activity was not just buying and sending cards, but actually making them and sending them to perfect strangers.

The leader of the group came armed with a list of names, card paper, envelopes and lots of embellishments to decorate the cards.

We were to come up with our own designs and write thoughtful lines to those who needed encouragement and living in far-flung countries.

I thought that was a perfectly lovely idea.

The last time I made a card was about a month ago. I designed a Hari Raya Aidiladha card for my Asian Muslim neighbour as I could not find such cards on sale here.

He was surprised because that was probably the first card he had ever received since he emigrated to Ireland. Shortly after I had given him the card, I went shopping.

When I returned, my daughter said my neighbour had called and given us a tub of payasam, a traditional South Asian sweet dish, made by boiling rice or broken wheat with milk and sugar, and flavoured with cardamom, raisins, saffron, pistachios or almonds.

Indeed, making and sending a card goes a long way.

First, we put our creative juices on paper. The array of felt pens, stickers and knick-knacks, like ribbons and plastic googly eyes, were enough to spur even the uninitiated into a world spiced with colour, patterns and originality.

Some took to drawing immediately, while others mulled over what to write and how to decorate the cards. For once, we felt like amateur Da Vincis with blank canvasses before us.

Next, I was sitting among friends, mothers and grandmothers. Female bonding, a term that is used in ethology and social science, spells patterns of friendship, attachment, and cooperation in women.

We came from different backgrounds and countries but we shared the same goal for the day.

It reminded me of the movie Letters to Juliet, a 2010 American romantic comedy film where a group of well-meaning volunteers sat down to answer thousands of missives left at the fictional lover's Verona courtyard.

Finally, just as in Malaysia, no meeting would be complete without the eating of comfort food.

We forgot about the carbohydrates, let down our guards and traded personal details and experiences. That was what hot aromatic coffee and custard creams did for the souls. Very welcome treats when the biting cold of Autumn winds continued to blow.

By midday, the group managed to whip up an impressive batch of cards all ready to be posted.

We may never know the responses of those who will receive them, but we all went home knowing that a specially-made card carried with it a lot of love.