It’s that time of the year again when you’ve got to decide whether or not to order holiday cards. Personally I get sad every year receiving fewer and fewer cards in the mail. There’s nothing quite like coming home to a full mailbox of holiday greetings and warm messages from friends letting me know how their year went. E-cards just don’t hold the same weight, literally and figuratively. Living in a time where e-mails are replaced by short tweets or Facebook messages, it’s often easy to forget how nice it can be do get a real card in the mail.

If you do send cards out this year, we recommend choosing a company that gives back. Not to toot our own horn, but Paper Culture plants a tree in your honor for every order.  If you want to skip the gift-giving this year, plant a tree for someone instead with a beautifully designed card. Now’s the best time to shop with a final sitewide sale of up to 50% off. There are many other companies that give percentages of the cards to charity. Choose a card design that reflects your style and personality. Consider adding a recently holiday photo. And most importantly, add a few lines of holiday cheer to let your lucky recipient know you’ve been thinking about there. Here’s to a happy and safe holiday season for all!

Happy Earth Day to our beloved readers! We hope you celebrated our favorite holiday in a way that was both inspiring and fruitful. Paper Culture has set a goal to plant 1,000,000 trees, one for each new Facebook like. Click here to get going, and dedicate your tree to someone special. We’ve planted 200,000 since Earth Day last year and are looking forward to the many, many more trees we’ll be putting into the ground through 2012 and beyond.

Over one billion people are dependent on our earth’s forest for their livelihood. And the benefits of trees are innumerable: producing oxygen, absorbing carbon dioxide, fighting soil erosion, and cleaning the air, just to name a few. Planting a tree is one of the simplest things we can do to show our planet that we care about tomorrow. In the spirit of the holiday, we’ve listed below some of our favorite quotes about trees, courtesy of the United Nations Environment Programme. How will you commemorate Earth Day 2012?

“The symbolism – and the substantive significance – of planting a tree has universal power in every culture and every society on Earth, and it is a way for individual men, women and children to participate in creating solutions for the environmental crisis.”

Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

“If you are thinking a year ahead, sow a seed.
If you are thinking ten years ahead, plant a tree.”

Chinese poet, 500 BC

“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”

Greek proverb

“If what I say resonates with you, it is merely because we are both branches on the same tree.”      

W. B. Yeats

“He who plants a tree loves others beside himself.“

English proverb

“The best friend on Earth of man is the tree. When we use the tree respectfully and economically,
we have one of the greatest resources of the Earth.”

Frank Lloyd Wright

“The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, ‘In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!’”

John F. Kennedy

Paper Culture Will Plant 1 Million Trees

I’ve told the story before about how sustainability was a central pillar in how we as the founders of Paper Culture wanted to build our business from Day 1. We’ve made some bigger commitments like always printing exclusively on 100% post consumer recycled paper. But we’ve done the smaller things as well, from choosing an office that is walking distance to major public transport to offsetting our carbon footprint. But of all of our initiatives, my favorite one is that we plant a tree in one of our nation’s forests with every Paper Culture order.
Today, we are extending that commitment and pledging to plant 1,000,000 trees by 2020. We’re a small company, so for us, it’s a huge commitment. It won’t happen overnight. Heck, it won’t happen even in the next year or two – but in some sense, that’s the point. We wanted to do something that wasn’t just about Earth Day 2011 or just about a press release, we wanted to do something that would require sustained focus and our team really rallied around this goal.

To kick start this effort, for the next 2 weeks (until April 30, 2011), we will be planting a tree for every new Facebook fan. Just “Like” our fanpage (www.facebook.com/paperculture) and we’ll plant a tree for you. If you’re already a fan, we’ll plant a tree if you fill out a tree dedication form. It’s that simple. No strings attached. No purchase required. No email signup. Notta.

In addition, starting today, when you make your purchase, we’ll give you the opportunity to dedicate a tree. We’ll create a permanent page for your dedication and our designers and illustrators have donated their artwork to help spruce up your dedication with some fantastic tree illustrations.

All of this is incredibly important to us, even more than most, because we understand that our business truly is about trees. In some sense that’s why we use only 100% post consumer recycled paper because it means that no new trees are cut down to produce our cards and with our Cards to Trees prorgram, your cards literally plant trees. But beyond the small world that is Paper Culture, we’ve probably all learned in grade school how important trees are for our well being – but the one or two lessons we learned about trees absorbing carbon and emitting oxygen are really only the tip of the iceberg. Trees’ true importance really cannot be overstated. I encourage you to check out our Cards to Trees page where we’ve accumulated some amazing facts about trees and the good they do.

With both Earth Day 2011 (April 22, 2011) and Arbor Day 2011 (April 29, 2011) quickly approaching, I can’t think of a more appropriate time to announce our commitment. I hope you join us in our quest to plant 1,000,000 trees. And remember, for the next 2 weeks, we’ll plant a tree for every new Facebook Fan, so plant away.