In this digital era, in which more and more people have access to the Internet, many still prefer to send hand-written holiday greeting cards in the mail.
“The feeling of mailing hand-written letters to the people you love cannot be compared to pressing a button when sending an email,” Ika Vantiani, 35, said.
Ika, an employee at a private company, still sends postcards and letters to her family and friends.
“I write letters and make my own postcards and send them to my closest friends a few times a week,” she said. “I enjoy every step of letter writing and postcard making from thinking of what to write or draw to wondering how the receivers will react.”
She said paper letters would continue to exist, despite that card makers like those at Pasar Baru, Central Jakarta, had all but died out.
“Painters in this area used to be popular for their greeting cards in Jakarta during the 1990s, but now there is only one painter who is still making hand-painted greeting cards,” Subardi S, one of the street painters, said.
Subardi, who stopped making greeting cards in 1998 when demand began to dry up, said that in those days many people used to buy hand-painted greeting cards, especially in the weeks leading up to holidays.
Such cards typically consist of an artistically written personal message and a painting on photographic paper.
Soleh, the only greeting card maker left in Pasar Baru, said he was trying to preserve the tradition of sending paper-based cards.
“There are still some people who want to buy the postcards, because they are more than just messages, they also have physical form to remind the receivers about their senders,” Soleh said.
He said he had sold less than 20 cards three weeks into Ramadan, adding that a decade ago he would have sold more than 50 by that stage. Soleh sells small photo-sized greeting cards for Rp 30,000 each, and larger ones for Rp 60,000. “I don’t want to lose out to digital postcards,” he said.
Tito Baroto, spokesman for national postal service PT Pos Indonesia for the Greater Jakarta and Banten areas, said that about 80 percent of Lebaran greeting cards were sent by companies rather than individuals. There were more individual senders than corporate ones before the digital era, he added.
As of the end of August, his office had send out 250,000 Idul Fitri cards. The number of letters, postcards and greeting cards sent from his office had dropped by 30 percent since the rise of the Internet and cellular phones, Tito said.
“We have created some new services to survive in this digital era,” Tito said. One of the new services is the Prisma stamp, which allows customers to use stamps featuring photos of themselves.
In addition, PT Pos Indonesia also offers an electronic gift system where an electronic bank transfer will be received at the same time as the accompanying letter sent in the mail.
Tito said that using this service, travelers who wanted to go to their hometowns no longer had to worry about carrying a lot of money.
“This service is available in 3,600 post offices across Indonesia,” he said. (not)
| 
|
|
|
|
|
|
|