And Christmas cards

 First time-embargoed post. I'll try to do a few of these for the coming weeks - I'll have my phone so I can tap out a few posts on it, but that's harder to do and not so suited for longform writing. (Thought: I wonder if part of the "death of blogs" is that many people now use their phone primarily for "social" or "fun" online stuff, and it's really hard to type on the tiny phone keyboard.)

Anyway. 

One of the things that seems to be slowly fading away as my parents' generation (The Silent Generation) begins to leave us, and the Boomers even begin to leave us, is sending Christmas cards. 

I've talked about this before. When I was young, my parents had a huge network of people they knew - my mom had many cousins (who are mostly gone now), they had friends from college, they had friends from my dad's first post in West Virginia, they had friends from the university he was at at that time, we had local friends...some years they sent well over 100 cards, and received about the same number. My mom had a small address book specifically for Christmas cards, and marked off if people had a new address, or if she got the card returned "no forwarding address" she crossed them off the list (We got one or two back stamped "deceased," I don't know if the USPS still does that, but it was sort of a sad way to find out)

She wrote short notes in every single one - oh, she wrote more extensive notes in the ones to people we knew well, or to close relatives - but she wrote them out; no Christmas letters for her (she was slightly dismissive of one family that usually sent FOUR closely-typewritten pages as a "family newsletter" and yes, that's quite a lot, even for a large family). In later years, especially when my dad's health worsened, she did default to a one-page newsletter outlining what had happened in the past year, but with room to write personal notes on some. (Now, she's back to handwriting the cards, as she has more time...)

Some years, when I was in high school, she hired me to type the address labels from her corrected address book. (We had the gummed address labels - back when you actually mail-ordered and paid for them. Now, I so often get them from charities that I just use those. In those days the address labels were like the old-style stamps; you had to wet them to activate the glue. I often put the stamps and the return addresses on the cards, using a damp sponge in a little bowl so I didn't have to lick them). 

And then, she'd make up all the cards, and we'd sort them by postmark (in our town there were different municipal postboxes for "local zip code" and "out of town zip code" and I admit I liked sorting the out of town cards in numerical order of zip code....I still do that some times.

Most years I go out and buy a box of cards. I usually don't use it up. Some years I have used past years' cards, with the idea that most people don't save cards and won't remember if I happen to send the same one two years in a row. A few people get "special" cards I go out and buy specifically for them - a couple friends got knitting-themed cards from the knit shop when I went there in early December. 

I like receiving cards, too. It's nicer than the usual junk mail/bills/catalogs I probably won't order from. I understand why people do it less now: cards and postage are expensive, it takes time to write them out, and with most people plugged into Facebook or similar it does maybe feel slightly ridiculous to do the "Christmas newsletter" type thing. But I still like cards and hope they persist a bit into the future.