USA, September 17, 2003: This year, for the first time ever, Hallmark will sell cards for the Hindu celebration of Deepavali or Diwali, as well as for the Muslim holiday of Eid ul-Fitr. “With the increase in the number of Hindus and Muslims, we realized there was an ongoing need that we were not satisfying,” said Deidre Parkes, spokeswoman for the Kansas City, Mo.-based Hallmark company that has been making greeting cards for Americans since 1910. While based on a desire to sell more cards, the new Hallmark cards are also a recognition of the changing face of America, said Egon Mayer, a sociologist at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Mayer directed the American Religious Identification Survey, which showed that the number of Hindu adults in the United States rose from 227,000 to 760,000 between 1990 and 2001. During the same period, the number of Muslim adults went from about 527,000 to 1.1 million.
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