Well, I hope everyone had a great REL/MLK day yesterday. If you were off from work, good for you. If you weren’t, oh well. We’ve just about got all the Christmas decorations put up. Yeah, I know, we’re running late. Well, mostly it’s me running late. We’ve had most of them actually down for a while, but I’ve yet to re-“store” them…y’know, put them up in the attic.
Is it just me, or does Christmas seem to fly by? And I mean that both ways: it gets here in a hurry each year, and then it’s over in a hurry. It feels like we just get the tree up and we have to take it down.
But with all the technology, I wonder if the art of the Christmas card is changing (not that it’s an art, but you get what I mean). A decade or so ago, folks stopped sending cards and opted for the “family update letter” in place of a card. Usually, it’s a Cliff’s Notes version of what that family has experienced over the last year. We hang our cards on a string every year…those letter-updates just don’t hang right. Oh, I’m not pointing fingers…we’re guilty of the occasional update letter.
In the last year or so, we’ve started getting email cards. There’s several places online you can get free cards, some of them pretty nice. I’ve grown to like them more and more because I feel I can more easily include folks. The last two years, my family has recorded a “Christmas greeting” video. That’s been fun. But the online cards have messed with my list a little, though.
Yes, I keep a list. Hey, Santa does it, I figured it was in the Christmas spirit to do so. Actually, my list started as a way to keep up with addresses and such. That, and I was always afraid I would accidentally forget someone and then they’d either be hurt or offended. Since I wanted to do neither, I started a list…and checked it twice. When I was heavy editing, the list grew very large—I used to send cards to all the creative talent I worked with. Talk about stamp licking.
The funny thing about my list, though…after a few years of keeping it, I got to noticing that some of the folks on my list never—and I mean never—sent cards to my family. Now I know there are some folks who just don’t do it and I know that the idea is give not receive—I know all that. But if we don’t get a card from someone after five years, they go off the list.
Another funny thing about keeping up with the list: on occasion, I have been late getting them out—like not mailing them until the 23rd. It’s funny because I’ll get cards then the week after the new year…very rarely (actually almost never) from someone not on my list…when I get to thinking about it, I think “ah-ha. They just got the card from us…they weren’t going to send us one but because they got one from us, they decided to send it.” Haha
Whether that’s true or not, I have no clue. But it is funny to watch how the art of Christmas cards have changed and continue to do so.
Roland Mann's Ramblin' Weblog 