“Hey, thanks for your Christmas card. It was really great reading about your year.”
Two people said that to me yesterday. But in the past few weeks, as classes and meetings and activities have resumed, I’ve heard it from three other families. I had no idea that a Christmas card, along with a simple one page letter about our 2023, would bring a grateful response.
This past Christmas was the first time in seven years that my wife and I sent out cards at all. Back in the nineties, before social media, we sent out about forty or so each year, and received at least as many. It was the way to keep up with family and friends in the places where we had lived.
In time, the amount of cards decreased. If we hadn’t heard from someone for three or four years, we dropped them from the list. As our list of friends on Facebook grew, we already knew what was going on in everyone’s life, so a Christmas letter was redundant. Emailed cards and greetings replaces those delivered by the mailman. Our mailing list shrunk until we finally concluded, “Let’s not.”
This past year we met a lot of new people and made a lot of new friends. We wanted to and needed to strengthen our connection with them. However, we’ve retreated from the advertisement-ridden, spam-filled, and bot-controlled social media world. “Let’s do it. Let’s send out Christmas cards this year.” So what if we had only gotten about two-dozen this year? So what if we would send out a variety of left-over cards from years gone by? So what if first class postage costs a whopping $.66? We’ll enclose an illustrated letter about our year and see what happens.
Of the cards we received this year, only contained had a newsletter. It was three narrow-margin pages of single-space, small-font prose, with a blurry photo collage on the fourth side. It was the epitome of TL;DR (too long; didn’t read). I was in charge of the letter, so I was sure to include lots of white space, a few high res pictures, and the facts, just the facts.
Next we had to assemble our mailing list. We had very few. Some we could look up online. But most name and address searches want your money before they will give names and addresses. My wife sent off a few emails to the right people, and we got all the info we needed.
When we had them all addressed and ready to go, I waited in line at the post office for about twenty minutes to get some Christmas-y looking stamps. We got them in the mail on the last day for delivery before Christmas. Mission accomplished.
We’re thankful for this chance to cultivate new and old relationships. (Oh, and by the way, we send out cards with baby Jesus on them. Just sayin’.)
It’s Christmas-card time again. Kind of. The numbers are dwindling. In years past, we received about fifty to sixty cards from friends we’ve made in the different places where we’ve lived. With five days to go, we’ve only received fourteen.
Waite for it... 