A birthday card for two people
On your birthday, the other one writes in it. Date it, sign it, fold it closed. On theirs, you trade. Twenty years from now you have the whole thing, in both your handwriting, one year at a time.
How it works
No apps, no reminders, no subscription. Just one good card that lives in the junk drawer between birthdays and gets better every year it survives there.
Partners, siblings, best friends, a grandmother and her grandkid. Any two people with birthdays. That’s the whole requirement.
A sentence or a page. There’s a small prompt in each space if you want a nudge, and plenty of room to ignore it if you don’t.
Then do it again on the next birthday. Open it any time and read the whole history at once, which is the best part.
Seven years in this card. You still laugh at my jokes, which is the real gift here.
The best thing you did this year…
You built a table, a barn door and half a nursery. Slow down. Happy birthday.
Something I want us to do before your next one…
Inside
Every page holds a year: one entry for each of you, color-keyed so you always know whose turn it is.
Built to be handled twice a year for decades. Fountain pen, ballpoint, crayon from a four-year-old helper. It takes them all.
The pattern is ours: an original damask drawn after the old wallpaper we fell for. Inside, the pages stay quiet so the handwriting does the talking.
The cards
Both close to an ordinary 5×7 card, so they fit in a drawer, a card rack, or a shoebox of things you’d grab in a fire.
One continuous strip, folded between two wallpaper-covered boards. Open it a year at a time, or stretch it across the living room floor and watch the decades go by. No spine to crack, nothing to fall out.
Folds like an old road map. Each birthday you open it a little further; fully open, it’s a 20×28 print meant for the wall. The back is all wallpaper, so it frames beautifully either way round.
Who it’s for
Our story
In 2019 we bought one birthday card and decided to keep it. On Alex’s birthday, Mike wrote in it and dated it. On Mike’s, Alex did the same. Then it went back in the drawer.
Every year since, the same card has come back out. It’s getting crowded in there, and it’s easily the most precious piece of paper in our house. Reading the old entries is like flipping through a photo album you wrote yourselves.
We wanted a card that was made for this: room for decades, sturdy enough to survive them, and pretty enough to leave out. So we’re making it.
Mike & Alex
Why the wallpaper
“Our first house was very old, and the wallpaper was the best thing in it.”
We adored it. The faded florals, the stripes in the hallway, the room that was a little too green. When we moved, we carried old-timey wallpaper into the new house too. It feels like your grandmother’s front room: a place where things are kept.
That’s the feeling we want in your hands every birthday. Elm Pass Card Co. is made in Center Point, Texas, by the same family behind Elm Pass Woods.
Good questions
Then that year gets a late entry, or a blank one, and that’s part of the story too. The card doesn’t judge. An entry that starts with “sorry, this is three weeks late” is still an entry.
You start Volume Two and keep Volume One somewhere safe. The Poster Fold is built as a twelve-year edition for exactly this reason, so the set lines up on a shelf or a wall.
Whatever’s in the kitchen drawer works. If you want it to last as long as you do, an archival pigment pen is the best bet. We’ll tuck a note in the box about it.
Not at all. It started with a husband and wife, but it works for any two people with birthdays: siblings, best friends, a parent and a kid, a grandparent and a grandkid.
We’re finishing the first batch now. It’ll be at a shop here in the Texas Hill Country first, then here online. Get on the list below and we’ll tell you the day it’s ready.
First batch
Leave your email and we’ll write to you when they’re ready. No newsletter. We have birthdays to get to.
One email when they’re ready. Then we leave you alone.