little seasonal task

I finished the rest of my Christmas cards this evening. I had sent a few earlier - I had one to go to the UK and I wanted to try to get it there before the holiday, and I was part of a card-exchange through one of the Ravelry groups I am on. Those went out on Monday (at least one has already arrived at its destination)

Friday, I sent a couple more; a couple special long-time friends of the family get "fancy" cards - the kind the have a pop-up scene or fold out to do something, and they take extra postage. I had to mail the lab books to my brother, so I took those down to the post office, too.

(As for my mail hold? I learned how to do that online and it seems pretty secure, and also it seems like you know for sure more that it "took")

This evening, I did a couple to family, and a bunch to friends at church - some of them to the Elders in my group, a few to friends who helped out after my dad's death this summer. I wound up using up the 10-pack of cards I bought and then using a couple extras leftover from an earlier year.

I don't think people send cards as much as they once did. I suspect Facebook has killed off a lot of Christmas card-sending. I remember when I was a kid, my mom had a list that approached 150 people - relatives, friends from school, friends from college, people they had worked with at earlier jobs, friends in town.... a couple years she paid me to type address labels for them.

Her list has dwindled too - mostly because a lot of the people have died off. It's....a little sad. But I remember growing up, how multiple cards would come in each day. They'd go in a big basket after they'd been looked at and passed around. Particularly nice ones were saved, or the cover pictures were cut out to make gift tags or even tree ornaments for the next Christmas.

(I suppose there are some people who would argue that cards are "wasteful," because they use paper, and you have to send them in a postal truck. But you know? Sometimes small things that make you happy are worth it, and most of the people I send cards to (and receive cards from) are not jetting around the planet, or living in 12,000 square foot houses, or taking cruises....I get tired of every small comfort of life beyond the absolute minimum for survival being derided as "wasteful" by someone).

I know fewer people send cards any more, but I enjoy it. And I enjoy receiving them. (I also enjoy e-cards, except some of them come with a payload of advertising and perhaps even malware. And somehow a REAL card in the REAL mail is nicer)

I do think part of my liking of doing Christmas cards is the childhood memory - that for some people my parents had known, this was the one point of contact all year long. And it was always interesting seeing the different zip codes that they came from (and even a few International cards)

It does seem like one of those slightly-vanished things. I know a lot of people do still send cards, but I think fewer people remember the pre-Facebook era when maybe the one time you heard from people was Christmas cards.

(And actually, maybe that's one reason I'm uninterested in Facebook: for some people, following them would be like reading that much-joked-about-and-interminable Christmas brag-letter, but on a weekly basis instead of once a year.)

Most years, my mom tried to write personal notes to each person; in recent years she went to a letter that she added notes on to. I think this year - having more time and not using the computer - she must have gone back to the handwritten notes. (I suspect there are a number of people on her card list who hadn't heard the Big News in my family of this summer, and this is how they'll find out....)