Saturday, February 7, 2015

Valentine's Day Cards 2015: Whales and Marshmallows are Trending.

I thought I didn't have much to say about Valentine's Day cards this year. I love you, you love me, insert pun here. After inadvertently buying two unicorn cards there with the same joke, "are you even for real?", I didn't know what could top that in 2015. Well I got my answer--despite my best efforts to keep our selection varied, I inadvertently bought four whale cards.

Stranger than that, I bought two cards that featured marshmallows.

Now animals are popular card images, and I often prefer them over human figures, as cards with humans don't highly the diversity that is our card buying audience. I'm sure I have at least four Valentine's Day cards with cats featured, and another four with dogs. There's at least one elephant image, one giraffe, one penguin.. There are monsters in love, volcanoes, wedges of cheese, bees, hot dogs, you name it.

So why was I so taken with whales (from Madison Park, Aritsts to Watch, and Hello Lucky/Egg Press). One card praised the "whale of a Valentine." Another referenced fish. Was the card referring to the whale itself (which is a mammal) or to the whale's food (which as our friend Jessica said, was just plain creepy). And two others had no whale-related text at all. "Happy Valentine's Day and here's a whale for you."

One observer noted that one of these whale drawings is actually more likely a narwhal.

And we both agreed the marshmallow images (from Calypso and Paper Parasol) were pretty cute.

No comments: