When it comes to cards I had to make one of those changes in my thinking that is often required of an expat or immigrant. Australians are very similar to the British, in my experience anyway, they love cards.

They love to write them. They love to receive them. And most of all they love to display them.

For a German person this might be really hard to believe but in Australia at Christmas time Australia Post offers a special rate for Christmas greetings. You can send Christmas cards for 10cents cheaper as long as they are ‘card only’. And you’re really not allowed to send anything else in that envelope but a Christmas card and most of the time these cards don’t contain any information about the sender of the card, nothing in terms of correspondence except “To dear M + F … Love from whoever”. In between these two handwritten lines is usually the printed stuff inside the card that’s always there already to help you save time when writing cards and you really haven’t got a clue what to write in the first place. In Germany we usually use the opportunity and write about everything that might be worth communicating and use Christmas as one of the main times for written correspondence with friends and family. But not here. Here you get punished if you’ve got any more to say that what fits next to that oversized printed text inside the card. You’ve got to pay extra.

For birthdays you get given a card along with the present, even though the person giving you the card is standing right in front of you and has ample opportunity to say everything there is to say.

Whatever the occasion, after receiving the cards they are then always liberally displayed inside the house and contribute to the festive decoration. And I’ve sometimes wondered whether they’re really there to let every visitor know how many friends you’ve got.

But I’ve got to confess, I’ve changed from my German ways and have put a long piece of string above our kitchen window, where we eagerly keen display all the cards that were sent to us (with varying amounts of actual information inside) and at Christmas time I do make use of the ‘card only’ rate (though I try and write really small and use both sides on the inside and the back).

So I had been a good little ‘Aussie’ and hung up all the cards that we received when E was born (that is 8 months ago now to the day), they had to move since then for M’s as well as my own birthday cards, but I had kept them all. Well the tradition or should I call it culture doesn’t really say what you’re supposed to do with all the cards once you’ve obediently displayed them for a while, so I was a bit unsure myself.

There was quite a stack of them as you can see in the picture and as I still hadn’t found some good use to put them too I used them to get this baby cranking and what a good firestarter they did make.

Hm … have I gone back to those ‘evil’ German ways after all??

*I’m very sorry if you’re one of those lovely people who sent us a card, we do love receiving them, honestly!! Just look at it from the economic side of things, you’ll be saving yourself $5 in future, cause I won’t expect a birthday card if you’re congratulating me in person :-)