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ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS HERALD
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For all of you who hate sending
Christmas cards, you’ve got an “out” this year.
You can blame it on anthrax. Even though polls say that
ninety-percent of the rest of us are going to stick to tradition and mail out
our usual number of cards, I won’t feel slighted by those who don’t.
I’ll assume that they’re merely looking out for my welfare. There are a lot of people out there who
never send cards. I don’t
understand that. I’m a
self-admitted card-aholic. Put a
good card in front of me and I’ll think of someone to send it to.
I can’t help myself. My
husband says that I am single-handedly keeping the Hallmark Company in
business. He told me once, “If they made a card that said, ‘Sorry to Hear About Your Hangnail’, you would buy it. They can see you coming a mile away.” Well, I guess the people in the card
stores could see me coming a mile away, too, because I used to show up in
November, before they even took the cards out of the cellophane wrappers. “’You got any with four snowmen on
them?” I would ask, “Or four little elves? You know, something that is
appropriate for a family of four to send.” One year, a card store employee handed
me an unopened pack of cards, that she was about to put out on the card rack and
said, “Here. You look
through them.” When I told my mother how many
Christmas cards I sent out one year, she I thought she was going to have me
committed right on the spot. “Are you nuts?” she said.
“Why do you have to send so many cards?” “Because I like to,” I answered,
“and I can’t not send cards to people if they send cards to us.
It’s rude.” “You’re being ridiculous,” she
said. “It takes up a lot of time
and it costs a lot of money.” You see, my parents have a “Christmas
Card Rule,” which states, “If you don’t get one from someone this
year, then you don’t send one to them next year.” I would argue with my parents in favor
of the neglectful friend or relative. “What
if there was a death in their family?” They would reply, “If there was a
death in their family, then we should have been notified.” Imagine, crossing someone off of your
Christmas card list, because they forgot to invite you to a funeral. “What if the person was sick, or had
an overwhelming problem?” I would persist. “That’s no excuse!” my parents
would say. “Everyone gets
sick and everyone has problems. You’re
supposed to send out Christmas cards.
You find a way. It’s
disrespectful not to.” I suspect my parents took the whole
Christmas card ritual a bit too seriously and a bit too personally.
I mean, the whole idea of sending out cards is an act of giving.
You’re not supposed to expect anything back.
A Christmas card is, after all, a “greeting.” It’s a way to
reconnect with our friends and loved ones to say, “we’re thinking about
you,” or “we miss you.” Isn’t
it? “’You know what you should do?”
my mother asked me. “You should not
send cards one year and see how many you get.” Well, one year, our family photo was
late coming back from the lab. I
was forced to send our Christmas cards out after Christmas.
Our tardy greeting had no effect on the number of cards we received
whatsoever. In fact, some worried
relatives actually wrote in their cards to us, “We didn’t get your card this
year. We missed seeing how big the
boys grew. Is everything
alright?” So there! I admit that exchanging Christmas cards
does present a few problems. First,
you have to make sure you remember everyone.
(You don’t want to insult people who share my parents’ views.) Then you’ve got to try to remember
all of the people who have moved over the year and hope that you changed it in
your address book. Then you’ve got to remember all of
the people who have died over the year.
I once sent a card to our Uncle Joe on my husband’s side of the family,
and wondered why I never got one from him.
His card was usually the first ones I received every year. “Did you get a card from Uncle Joe
this year?” I asked my sister-in-law. “No,” she replied. “I wonder why he didn’t send cards
out this year?” I said. “Maybe it’s because he’s dead,”
she answered. “Uncle Joe died?” I
exclaimed. “Yeah,” she said.
I think he died last summer. I admit that my Christmas card list had
grown over the years. I guess
it’s because I tend to keep in touch with people who I’ve met along the way,
more than most. There’s the entire family, my current
friends, friends from elementary school, friends from high school, teachers from
high school, and teachers from college. There are the people from all my jobs,
going back to the first job I had, more than twenty-five years ago. Then there’s the mailman, the UPS
man, the Federal Express man and the person who delivers our
paper. We see these people almost
every day at our house. How can I
not give them a card? There are also my husband’s friends
from college, his friends from work, his friends from his old jobs, his current
boss, and his former bosses. These
people send us cards every year, so how can we ignore them? There are all the “new” family
members I found, during my adoptive search, and all the people who helped me
find them. There’s an elderly
lady who lives next door to my grandfather’s old house, who told me pieces of
my family history I might have never known, if she hadn’t invited me in for a
cup of tea one day. She sends me a
card every year. I should ignore her? There are the mothers from the old car
pool and the mothers from the old swimming pool.
There are the guys in the acoustic band, the guys in the blues band, and
the guys in my new band. There’s the guy who cuts my hair, the
guys who used to cut my sons’ hair, and the lady who cuts the dogs’ hair. There are the people I met on the church trip to Italy (we
spent ten whole days together), the people I met on Jury Duty (it was a
long trial), and all our neighbors. Oh
yeah, and my Avon Lady. Maybe I do get a little carried away.
One Christmas, my girlfriend and I had a few errands to run together.
I went to her house to pick her up and saw our family Christmas photo on
her refrigerator. “Oh, I see you received our card.” We then stopped by her mother’s house
to pick up her son. I saw our
family Christmas photo on her mother’s refrigerator. “Oh, I see you received our card.” When we dropped her son off at Anthony
and Jimmy’s Barber Shop in Belford, there was our family Christmas photo
on their mirror. “Oh, I see you received our card.” A thought came to me.
If, in a thousand years, someone finds our family photos in an
archeological dig, they’re going to think that we were the Royal Family. Maybe I should cut down. No!
The way I see it, people this year are going to need some cheering up
more than ever. And if a Christmas
card from us helps, then so be it! |
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