I got a Christmas card from a friend a few days ago. It is a beautiful card.
She has sent me a card every year since I moved away 15 years ago, and it always makes me feel good to know she still thinks of me.
The card also brought back a lot of memories of my childhood when there were Christmas cards hanging on ribbon going all around the room.
The mailbox was always full of cards during December.
I remember ‘helping’ my mother decide who would get which card out of the big box of assorted cards, and then making the big decisions by myself when I got married.
Thinking about all those cards and good feelings made me decide that in this year of disappointments and separation I would send out cards.
First I had to hunt for some cards that actually said Merry Christmas, but I won’t get into that rant today.
Well, just a little bit. Christmas is not a season to be greeted, it is not just a holiday, it is the celebration of the birth of Christ, therefore Christmas. Please remember that.
Next, I made a list of the friends to send the cards to, then I had to get their mailing addresses.
Not easy! I don’t even have an address book anymore. My friends are all in my contact list on my phone. Well, their names and phone numbers are but not their addresses.
In this day of cheap talk and text we never mail anything to anybody, it is just too easy to text them.
So I got a coffee and started going through my list and texting each asking them to send me their mailing address.
A few weeks ago I had been complaining that I could never hear the text ringtone from the back of the house so I had gone through a bunch of new sounds and picked what I thought was a good ‘loud’ one so I would hear when I got a text.
A few minutes after sending the last text for addresses I started getting answers and for the next two hours I was hearing a very loud “Jazz guitar riff” every few minutes.
I finally got everything organized and sat down at the table to write them out.
This made me remember watching my mother do the same thing, stacking the addressed envelopes up as she wrote them.
When I finished and looked at my own stack of envelopes I wonder if she had also felt the same sense of joy and peace that I did.
Let’s bring back the lines of cards going around the room, let’s bring back the joy of receiving and sending Christmas cards.
Merry Christmas to all!
by Lois Perepelitz