Greeting Cards

2501 McGee St, Kansas City, MO

Last updated 8/27/2026

Valentine's Day greeting cards trace back to handmade paper valentines exchanged in England and colonial America well before mass production existed, but the holiday's modern card-giving tradition owes its scale substantially to Hallmark, founded in Kansas City in 1910, which became the dominant force in commercially printed greeting cards across the 20th century. The Greeting Card Association estimates that roughly 145 million Valentine's Day cards are exchanged in the United States each year, excluding the additional cards children exchange in school classroom valentine parties — a scale that makes Valentine's Day the second-largest card-sending occasion of the year in the US, behind only Christmas. That classroom-exchange tradition, in which schoolchildren give small valentines to every classmate rather than a single romantic recipient, has broadened the holiday's card-giving custom well beyond romantic couples alone, embedding it into American childhood as a shared classroom ritual rather than purely an adult romantic gesture. Its combination of centuries-old handmade paper valentine traditions and a modern mass-production greeting card industry anchored by companies like Hallmark has made the greeting card one of the most universally exchanged Valentine's Day gifts across every age group in the country.

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Box of Chocolates
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Jewelry
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