Sorry, folks, I don’t mean to be a Bah Humbug Negative Nellie at this allegedly most wonderful time of the year, but here’s my take on Christmas cards. I don’t send them. Haven’t for years. Never will again.

Years ago, I looked it up (this was pre-Google so that’s what people did — they went to the library to do that looking up thing) and found that over 20 million trees had to die every single year to supply people with Christmas cards. A whole lot more to supply us with paper towels, but that’s another cause for another time.

OK, you’re saying trees are a renewable resource and that’s so, but still, seriously? These innocent trees have to be felled so we can send people cards they glance at, sometimes smile and quite soon recycle or just toss in the garbage?

I know many arts and crafts folks save all incomings and cut them up and make decorations for the following Christmas, and teachers collect them for ditto. I get it that Christmas cards are an industry that supplies jobs to card designers, artists and poets who make up charming messages for those cards. I also get it that it’s a great way to get the distant or not so to include X-mas letters in those cards, whether all true, semi-true or out and out departures from the truth about all the family’s great life successes, the enormous salaries they’re making, the Ferraris they’ve ordered and how their kids are all being chased after by Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge and MIT, how their dogs can speak in simple sentences, their plans to buy a villa in the South of France, and how their toddler grandchildren can sing the “Star Spangled Banner” in harmony, recite the Encyclopedia Americana verbatim and can already speak three languages, one of them Lithuanian.

However, knowing all this, I won’t send cards and haven’t for decades. When I receive them, I always send a thank you note with a very brief catch-up letter including my buying a used Subaru or telling of our minute-by-minute trip to New Jersey, and I generally get these missives sent out around Easter. Then, I recycle.

And folks, let’s talk about money. Cards today are so expensive, at least the nice ones, and I’m not talking about the ones that play “Jingle Bell Rock” when you open them. Just normal, average cards. I am not interested in taking out a loan to follow and support this old and expensive card-sending tradition. All kinds of celebratory cards today cost a whole lot just to buy them, and then to add that ever-increasing postage on top of that? Come on. Take that money and send it to poor kids who don’t get to have Christmas the way other kids can. Now that matters, right? Do it!

My taking this very boring, noble, tree hugging stand against Christmas cards always gets one response every year without fail, from a cranky old lady relative in Oregon, who sends me a card, does not sign it with her name but with just one word. “TIMBER!” She is such a caution.

Merry, Joyful and Happy to all of you reading this.

LC Van Savage is a Brunswick writer.