User:Weebils/Hallmark Greeting Cards

A typical Hallmark greeting card

Famous for its slogan, “When you care enough to be a pest,” Hallmark greeting cards are prewritten sentiments that range from the maudlin to the sentimental. Sappy, syrupy, corny, and saccharine, with bad art and worse “poetry,” these cards tug so hard at the heartstrings that the organ could be ripped out, still beating, from the resulting chest cavity and create quite a mess, especially on Valentine’s Day, anniversaries, or Groundhog’s Day.

“Critical Occasions”

For a stamped, self-addressed envelope (or a SASE, as it’s known in the business), Hallmark will send customers a list of the holidays (in addition to “regular” holidays such as Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving, and Halloween) that Hallmark considers “absolutely critical” occasions for the sending of a card to express one’s sentiments. To save you the money that you would have to spend for the stationery and the stamp and the hour or two you’d have to waste standing in line at the local post office, waiting to be waited on by slovenly, lazy, unkempt postal workers who just might be homicidal maniacs who hate you, personally, and would like nothing better than for you to just go away, Uncyclopedia has done the dirty work for you, and here, with as much fanfare and as many flourishes and trumpet blasts as possible, is the official Hallmark list of memorable occasions:

• Sarah Michelle Gellar Day
• Winter Solstice
• Stay-A-Virgin Day
• National Masturbation Day
• Groundhog’s Day
• Happy Holidays Day
• Hallmark Greetings Cards Day
• Boomerang Day
• Wal-Mart Shop-’til-You-Drop Sales Day
• Koi Appreciation Day
• Vegetarian Day
• No Fur Day
• Its Night time! Day
• Dog Days
• Playboy’s Playmate of the Month Day
• Sexyity Sexy Sex Day (Also known as Robert Pattinson day)or (sex bomb pattinson day);]
• TWILIGHT DAY!!! Complete with Edward Cullen! (see above) ^

Other Interests

Hoops & Yoyo

Because, despite the many holidays, personal days, and “critical occasions” for remembering someone with a Hallmark greeting card, the company’s revenues have steadily declined as more and more people have become literate enough to write a few lines of terrible verse themselves and can actually use a computer graphics program to design, “illustrate,” and print their own pictures to accompany their horrid poems, Hallmark has launched a series of new products, including (to name just one and save Uncyclopedia readers another boring list), Hoops & Yoyo (a pair of animated characters). The company also makes “collectible ornaments,” gift wrap, and festive toilet tissue. In addition, Hallmark has bought successful smaller companies, including Crayola Crayons, a recording company that produces compilation albums, and Smith & Wesson, a handgun manufacturing company for customers who want to deliver a somewhat nontraditional greeting to ex-loved ones.

To advertise its product, Hallmark sponsors television shows on its Hallmark Channel. Mostly the shows air artsy-fartsy fare that is intended to put viewers into a comatose or catatonic state and, therefore, a “Hallmark-buying mood.”

Famous Customers

Many celebrities buy Hallmark greetong cards, sending them to friends and foes alike, as do, of all people, serial killers.

David Berkowitz

David Berkowitz, better known, perhaps, as Son of Sam, bought a Hallmark and inscribed it with this little missive:

To meet once more

And I guess the time is now

I should say hello, but how?

Happy Mother's Day!

(You were my mother in a very special way).

Son of Sam's dog, Sam, told the killer just how to "say hello" upon the killer's fateful meeting with his adopted "mother."

John Wayne Gacy

John Wayne Gacy, the homosexual murderer of young men, also sent Hallmarks, including a Chrsitmas card that he sent to a criminal profiler. The hand-drawn card, illustrated by Gacy himself, showed a decorated Christmas trees and several snowmen with erections; the inscription, in Gacy's own calligraphic handwriting, read:

Peace on earth. Good will to men . . . and boys — John Wayne Gacy

Ed Gein

Ed Gein, the transvestite serial murderer upon whom Robert Bloch based his novel Psycho (the basis, in turn, for the Alfred Hitchcock movie of the same title), Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, and Leatherface of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame, also enjoyed sending Hallmark cards to those who corresponded with him during his years as a psycho patient in a state mental institution.

Alfred Gaynor

Alfred cared enough to be a pest

Alfred Gaynor sent the Hallmark card shown here, which is described this way by its illiterate seller:

Here we have a real [sic] nice greeting card handmade by convicted "serial killer" Alfed Gaynor. A lot of time and emotion went into the creation of this piece. The front features a drawing of a rose bleeding onto a highway and the moon with a skull face crying a single bloody tear. It is signed Alfred Gaynor. The inside left has a tracing of his right hand and it says "my right hand" and is signed Alfred Gaynor. The inside right has a drawing of blood dripping and it says "poletics [sic] and power" "who are the real criminals in society" "YOU DO THE MATH." The back had [sic] another drawing of the highway and . . . his initials AJG where the card logo would normally be, made in S. B. C. C (the prison he's in) and a barcode with his prison number as the numerals. So you get three drawings, two autographs and a hand tracing from the man the press has dubbed "Prison Picaso" [,] all for one low price! [1]

A Typical Hallmark Sentiment

Normally, Hallmark inscriptions are less melodramatic than those of serial killers, although perhaps more maudlin. A typical Hallmark verse:

Roses are red

Violets are blue

I bought this Hallmark

Because I love you.

The Hallmark Channel

The Hallmark Channel, like the greeting card, is just as family-friendly, including such programming as 7th Heaven, Little House on the Prairie, and every other TV show thrown off grittier networks.

However, beyond this there is a dark side to the Hallmark Channel, a dark, seedy hellhole with such dark programs as Columbo, Matlock, The Librarian, and cut-to-hell A Fist full of Dollars.