So we have the majority of our Christmas cards signed, sealed, and mailed. But not without SCANDAL!
I mentioned that this year got glittery Christmas cards this year. I paid more for about 70 cards than I normally would, but two 35 packs were available at the warehouse store the day I wanted to start and I did not want to make another stop at Walmart to get more Brian-priced Christmas cards, so I forked over a handful. They’re pretty nice, though: glitter aside, they come with pretty and decorated envelopes and little foil seals for the back of the envelopes. So they were very lah-di-dah indeed. And spilled glitter everywhere.
However, I ran out of the new cards a little before I ran out of names and addresses. Which led to the conundrum:
If started mailing out plain cards, they likely would have glitter in them as the table where I prepared the cards will not give up the last of the stray glitter until sometime next year. So these recipients would likely get non-glittery cards with bits of glitter upon them. They might think that they do not rate with the Noggle family to get the fancy cards and might take offense.
I mean, this would mostly be my family, as somehow our Christmas card list is weighted so that the sixty-five percent of it comes before N, and family members who have married have married down in the alphabet. Except for my cousin who married Jeff AAABest (who has his own business); I simply forgot to re-sort the list this year, so she’s still listed under her old married name way down the alphabet. I could not slight my families!
So I did the next worst thing: I sent them some of the glittery cards remaining from 2018.
So they might look at the cards and say, “Oh, how the glitter clashes!” The 2018 cards have silvery glitter to represent snow; the 2020 cards have gold glitter from the frame of golden-hued cards. Or the recipient might look at it and say, “Wait, this is a repeat of the card from 2018!”
Either way, it’s less SCANDALOUS and hurtful than sending them cards with no glitter at all.
Or at least that’s the drama I inserted whilst I wrote out the Christmas cards.
In other news, I removed two families from the list this year (SCANDAL!). The first was a couple I went to high school with who married; we sat with them at my 10 year high school reunion 20 years ago and started sending them Christmas cards sometime thereafter. We haven’t received a card from them maybe ever, so twenty years is my limit! The other is a family who were friends of my parents as they lived across the hall from us in the middle 1970s. They lived not far from the store where I worked at college, so I saw them from time to time–the first time, I heard the gentleman’s voice before I saw him. He definitely had a radio announcer or movie trailer voice. They stayed in touch with my mom over the years, even coming for a visit — well, I guess that was also twenty-some years ago. I have not heard from them in a long time, and they’re getting up there. If they’re still alive.
The real scandal of the Christmas cards, I suppose, is that it gives me the one chance a year to think of and to communicate in a one-way fashion with people I’ve known and I think fondly of, but not fondly enough to keep in greater touch throughout the years. Some of them are on Facebook, or were for a while, but I’m not on Facebook much any more, and I hardly saw things from them when I was, either because they stopped participating or because Facebook has curated them out of my feed for its own ends.
So, for me at least, Christmas cards are about the warm feelings they give me and are a completely selfish pursuit. But I really do wish the recipients a Merry Christmas and a blessed 2021.
