let me swing this the other way round (ok, it a bit of clutch at straws as you’re right to feel pissed off)
In places I worked we operated unwritten rule of no presents except leaving present collection, wedding and maternity (stuff for baby) . Birthdays were bring in your own birthday cakes or food to share. so if you wanted your colleagues to celebrate with you being your own food in! Even for big birthdays. Yep there’d be a card sent round, but usually someone would “make one” from a bit of playing around on the computer with something jokey amd relevent to that colleague. We would do a secret Santa but the £ was capped very low and people needed to be creative. We had a lot of homemade stuff with that.
The reason is that doing collections for every birthday, or even big birthdays costs people a lot of money. They feel social pressure to do it. They feel pressured to give more than just loose change, and all those £5 or £3 soon mount up taking money from family budgets. In a lot of offices there are people,like you that want to organise collections to be “kind” but a lot of folks hate it, wish it would stop, and resent their hard earn cash being “taxed” to give present to people they’d not be friends with outside of work, or even people they don’t much like in work. They’d like to spend that money on their own friends, kids or spouse or whoever is their choice. Not yours.
your colleagues and boss not doing a collection means you are likely the lone voice here wanting to do this. Every time you’ve done the whip round they’ve been at best just going along to be seen as nice, or actively resenting it, consider it a waste of money ( dare I say particualrly men who don’t put as big a value on these kind gestures typically ). So, naturally they’ve not done it for you. They want it, and you, to stop.
so, if that’s correct, stop. You’ve “read the room” incorrectly. Individuals were probably delighted to be gifted, but still want it to stop.
If you still think giving a card is nice, then do 2 things. Talk to your colleagues to ask if they’d like to have cards, or how they’d like to recognise birthdays if at all. Let everyone decide. If they say yes they’d like to still give cards, publish a list of birthdays so reminders in the whole teams diary, and come up with system on how to buy/create the necessary cards- frankly making them is a darn site less expensive and quick , just needs someone to spend 15 mins of lunch break messing around on computer.
do the bring your own cake thing. Means you won’t be forgotten. If people aren’t fussed celebrating their birthday (and a lot of folks aren’t) they don’t bring . Simples