June and July are big celebration months for me. In addition to Father’s Day, the birthdays of all thee of my children and my mother’s and father’s birthdays all fall in the twin J’s as well.

Not all of these events require gifts (not since the Great Schwartzberg Family Gift-Giving Compromise of 2003), but they all require cards. At about $3.50 a card, that’s nearly 25 bucks spent to have complete strangers talk intimately to my close family on my behalf, roughly equivalent to eight movie rentals, 12 ice cream cones, or half a New York City haircut.

The price would be okay if the people who wrote and approved American greeting cards spent a little time here on Planet Earth. But can you remember the last time you picked out a card and thought: “Gosh, this expresses my feelings perfectly!” More likely, you scanned a bunch of cards, put most back, and reluctantly settled on the one with the fewest words and the most innocuous picture. You’re not alone. Most people enter card stores hopeful, but leave disappointed. Kind of like Giants Stadium.

When I graduated from high school, my classmates and I paid to have little cards made with our names elegantly printed on them. We exchanged these with each other and coveted them like they were pieces of ourselves. A few years later I came across my accumulated cards, all with the same flowery font, the same embossed border, the same soft white background, and thought, “what was the point in that?” Even the plumber’s card has his fax number.

Store-bought greeting cards are no different, really. Sure, we add a personalized TO YOU at the top and a LOVE, ME at the bottom, but really it’s just a generic, overpriced piece of colorful cardstock with insipid verse and the kind of art you associate with very cheap motels.

Birthday cards are probably the most popular of all greeting cards, but why do so many of them treat aging past 40 as something that deserves cruel and often sadistic ridicule? If it’s not acceptable to tell your grandfather he’s becoming a fossil to his face, why is it any more acceptable to say it in a card? Nonetheless, card companies insist on creating cards that basically say, “”I’m sure glad I’m not as old as you are!”” Nice.

Oddly, the funniest event cards I’ve seen are the ones you buy on behalf of your pets. What makes it odd is that, as far as I can tell, pets don’t possess a sense of humor, much less an event calendar. No one really needs or expects a card from their pet. Card companies are just leveraging the unconditional love you have for them to take another $3.50 from you. But do your poor, slobbering, incontinent pets ever see a dime of that money? Nope.

Sympathy cards frustrate me even more. They expound ad nauseum on themes of life and loss in a way that make Chinese fortune cookies read like Shakespeare. And why do so many sympathy cards rhyme? A sad person needs a rhyming sympathy card like a happy person needs a kick in the shins. Forget the rhymes and the egregious calligraphy; I suggest sympathy cards just catch up with the times: how about “”So Sorry To Hear You Were Job-Eliminated””, “”Condolences on Your Bankruptcy” or “”Sorry About Your Recent Indictment””?

Sometimes you’ll see a perfectly good card on the outside. You think to yourself, “”there could be nothing but white space on the inside and I’d still get it. What could ruin it?”” Then you open it and find something so crude, dumb, or ridiculous that you have to put it back immediately. But you can’t find the exact spot from which you plucked it, so you nervously place it in front of a Garfield card and quickly leave the store. It’s okay, no one buys Garfield cards.

I think we should resist bad cards altogether. Start making your own. What does it take, really? A piece of paper, a pen, and the rare ability to fold things in half. Just write what you feel, whether it’s one word or one hundred. The result is something relatively free to you but probably invaluable to the receiving party.

When you’re done, take the $3.50 you saved and buy some ice-cream for both you and your recipient. Lick for lick, ice cream tastes way better than envelope glue.