The DorseyCard

Most economists and analysts foresee a pretty good year, neither boom nor bust. Their major worry is that too many people are worried.

Anonymous

A folding card with a black arc across the front, reading as an upside-down smile. Opening it turned the same curve into a rainbow.

Man's mind, stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

A square card with its corners folded in and sealed under a blue sticker. Unsealing it let the corners fall open to reveal the line in silver foil against a sky, and the card stood on those same corners so the message read upward.

You reap what you sow… Hoe Hoe Hoe!

Don Dorsey

A visual pun. The front set the line up; the inside paid it off with Grant Wood's American Gothic redrawn as Santa and Mrs Claus, the pitchfork swapped for a hoe.

Life is woven out of air by light.

J. Moleschott

A standard folding card, entirely black. The quotation was blind embossed on the front with no ink at all, and the inside carried a gold foil image of light. On a mantelpiece of red and green it stood out by refusing to.

Scott Kim's reversible lettering: the words Merry Christmas drawn so they form a Christmas tree balanced on an elongated t. Printed in foil on clear plastic so it read from either side, red on one face and silver on the other. Nobody had done foil on clear plastic before, and it took some experimenting to stop the foil cracking and peeling.

Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.

Anonymous

Die-cut wavy lines receding toward a star-shaped hole at the horizon, brightening as they converge, together making a tree with a star on top. The quotation was blind embossed so it read as a halo around the star.

The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The outside was a tiled pattern of opposing arrows printed in varnish, which changed direction depending on the light and on who was looking. Inside, an Escher-style staircase drawing populated with Santas. The card had no front and no back.

How come if God is so all-powerful and omnipotent that he has such a short…

Nina Weisman, age 6

A six-year-old's question in crayon on the front, cut off before the last word, the rest sealed under a flap and a green sticker. Don's answer underneath ran to one word: Because!

All too often, the anticipation is greater than the event.

Anonymous

Three envelopes nested inside one another, grey then blue then orange, each sealed with a sterner warning against opening it early. The innermost held a folded index card with the line printed on it and an entirely ordinary holiday greeting.

A postcard sent the year Bachbusters came out, parodying its own album cover. Where the sleeve had Bach striding along playing a keytar, the card had Don as Santa in full beard, scarf flying, playing air guitar on an oversized candy cane.

Not a card but a Möbius strip in a gift box, printed with a greeting that runs back into its own beginning: two sides to every greeting, from which you can never escape, and then it starts again.

Creative imagination must stop well short of delirium.

Calvin Wells

The quotation on the front panel. Inside, Don's one-word rebuttal, Sometimes, beside a photograph of him with a fully decorated Christmas tree going in one ear and out the other.

A strip of six scratch-off tickets called Stocking Scratchers. Match three and you won Peace on Earth; match two and you won a year's supply of Goodwill Toward Men. The small print put the odds of a cash prize at zip.

It arrived wrapped in fishpaper under a fishmarket label. A die-cut cod in a Santa hat burst through the front with an ornament in its mouth, its lit-up body inside, its tail coming out of a wreath on the back, and the carols indoors retitled for the occasion.

Please look for DorseyCards next year at the regularly scheduled time.

Dorsey Productions

A black-and-white postcard announcing that there would be no card that year, so everyone could concentrate on the recession instead. The gag was the absence.

A convincing credit card: embossed name, account number, hologram, magnetic strip, styled after MasterCard with Christmas baubles. Inside the folder, Heaven doesn't take American Express! On the card itself, Easier to carry than fish!

A jumbo playing card. A Madonna and Child composed to read the same either way up, drawn like stained glass in black outline and metallic foils. It used eleven foil colours on a single sheet when four had been the industry maximum, and won the printer technical awards for managing it.

Two years after the credit card, everyone who had one got a statement. Twelve versions, fourteen charges apiece from firms such as Gold, Frankincense & Myrrh, Legal Services and Not a Creature Was Stirring, Automated Bakery, adding to an alarming and very overdue balance. A reply envelope was enclosed.

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.

Annie Dillard

The first half of the line on the front, written in sand at sunset inside a Polaroid. Inside, a bronze hourglass with the whole quotation on its base, the sand running through and settling into a sand painting below.

Sent the year the Main Street Electrical Parade played its farewell season, and hinting the DorseyCard might be going the same way. A fortune cookie came with it, holding one of fifteen fortunes written for that particular recipient, which left a choice: break the cookie, or keep the card intact.

Don at a table with a wok of vegetables, in snow, between two lit pines near Salt Lake City, Santa peering round one trunk and a reindeer in the distance. The scene really was staged and shot outdoors, and looked so unlikely that the back of the card carried behind-the-scenes photographs as proof.

A knight lying still on the ground on the front, and inside, the words Silent Knight in braille. The back turned it: a tribute to Scott Powhatan of Disney's Millennium Celebration team, who had died, set beside a passage on how knights once conducted themselves that read pointedly against how the company was conducting itself at the time.

A box with two stones in it, one large and one tiny. The pebble was what the rock used to be, a demonstration of deep time, reframed as a cave-dweller's holiday greeting with the larger rock standing in as the replica. Imported from China, for the international angle.

Part two, sent to anyone who followed the instructions in the 1999 card. A metal box that played the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey on opening, holding an engraved pen and 101 acid-free pages numbered 2000 to 2100 with the recipient's name on them, for a century of one entry a year.

The silver anniversary card went electronic. A password screen opened onto the Frosty Bureau of Investigation: holiday alerts, a suspect letter to Santa containing uncooked cookie dough, and a Most Wanted poster for Uncle Santa.

Dorsey has used weapons of mass entertainment against his own people and is capable of inflicting amusement which could potentially reach all nations of the world.

Resolution #200-3, the Insecurity Council of the United Notions

The second electronic card, written as a wire-service press release from New Yuck. The Insecurity Council passes a binding New Years Resolution against DorseyCard, inspectors are dispatched to Anaheim, and chief inspector Hans Blitzen warns that Don will have to face the music. Don's reply: the real terror would be if the plans fell into the wrong Hans.

Don testifies before a Senate panel investigating pre-Christmas intelligence, and whether DorseyCards have misled anyone into the holidays. He maintained that if he pulled out of DorseyCards now, friends and associates would begin to terrorize him.