My beautiful wife helped with Christmas cards this year, so we got the sixty-five or so addressed in two days, which is good because we started late. Every year, I think I should start at the beginning of December or even late November, but I never do.
Our Christmas card list is dwindling. A couple of years ago, it was almost one hundred. But people have moved, cards have been returned, or people have died. Sometimes we never know.
When the card comes back with the yellow label or when we learn otherwise someone has moved, the address gets erased but the name gets left on with a grey or yellow stripe. How long until I remove those lines from the list? Scott’s been on it ever since I started tracking diligently in the spreadsheet instead of working from an address book like an old man–I think we briefly worked from my wife’s Google contact list, but it favored recent friends.
Most of the people on our list are acquaintances from twenty years ago or more. I’ve got two friends from my time in Milwaukee in college; a couple of former co-workers, but nothing since 2007 when I went fully remote consulting. We’ve added a couple from church and the family of a girl who attended school with my youngest, but mostly it’s from 20 years ago, and mostly it’s the only contact we have with most of them, especially since Facebook has gone to ads, suggested posts, and slop instead of, you know, friends.
So far, we’ve gotten seven Christmas cards. And of those, one are from the Lutheran school we continue to support and one is a thank you card from our postal carrier after we gave her a couple of gift cards.
Christmas cards seem to be becoming an anachronism; we receive fewer each year, too, and it would seem odd to start adding to the list now.
It kind of feels like casting my bread upon the waters except without the return. But that kind of matches most of what I do with my life. A blog with a couple of readers (Rick and Chinese LLMs, mainly). Publishing books which yielded, what, 50 sales (John Donnelly’s Gold), 1 sale (The Courtship of Barbara Holt), and maybe ten sales (Coffee House Memories). I’ve written and released apps to lackluster sales (Boxing Drill Companion, 2; Dr. Franklin’s Art of Virtue Tracker, 2; Nico’s Kitty Translator, 3).
So, like so many things these days, instead of joy or pleasant memories of the people to whom I’m addressing the cards, the experience reinforces my fin de siècle mood these days.
