Should I send New Year postcards or not?

Should I send New Year postcards or not?

    I don't know what is so special about New Year except a chance to rest from work

or school and I don't like some customs which keep you unnecessarily busy in the end of December, the time you could enjoy more time with your family.

    For example,  Japanese people have a tradition to send greetings postcards on New Year.

They send them to friends, business partners, and far relatives who live out of walking or driving range. New Year post cards are called "Nenga-jou", which means "a letter of celebrating the New Year". The first line in the card usually starts with "congratulations on starting a new year". The closing line says "We hope to have your further favor in new year."

    Speaking of "favor", the middle text might contain the line about "being grateful for all your help and support during the last year" even without having something concrete in real.

Generally, the Japanese new year card starts with congratulations, continues with gratefulness (and sometimes, best wishes of happiness) and ends with expectations of having more of the above.

Every year there is nothing more in the post cards. 

    However, for many years people worked out some ways of enjoying this obligatory tradition.

First is - to check the pictures. Many people think that putting their happy family picture on a new year postcard will serve two purposes - to remind their friends how the family looks (who they are) and to ensure people that they are happy indeed. Receiving pictures of each other, people may count the number of kids (oh! another baby!), or the number of wrinkles (oh! she looks much older, haha), or check the new condo or the fancy car in the back (oh! they spend more that they could afford!).

    Elderly use this new year tradition as a chance to make a full inventory of their acquaintances,

who has made it to the new year and who unfortunatelly hasn't.

Recent popularity of social networks and smartphones has made it easy to exchange seasonal greetings. The tradition of sending postcards is already in a danger of extinction. Now all you have to do is to create proper groups and contact lists on your devices and send your "congrats - thanks - best wishes" message by one click.

    In my opinion you don't have to burden yourself with purchasing hundreds of post cards, writing, printing, and sending them to all your co-workers or acquaintances just to follow the tradition. But if you want to share something good or make someone happy, you don't have to wait until the end of the year.

    It's so easy to do it with the internet right now.