377 days, blog #139 or why I really don't much care for Christmas cards

I don’t know if this makes me a Scrooge or just ungrateful.  I don’t like Christmas cards.
 
Well maybe don’t like is too strong… or too defined a sentiment.  They mostly make me feel awkward.  Especially when the handwritten part under the pre-printed verse is a mere merry/happy/some sort of joy inducing wish for Christmas/holidays and name.  It’s so generic and then I have a card that I feel bad for putting immediately in the recycle bin after someone spent the money on a stamp and whatever cost of purchasing a box of cookie cutter images and words.  So… okay… I guess I’ll put it on top of the piano or the mantel, which come to think of it should probably be dusted while I’m here putting the card in a position that won’t provoke gravity to lure it into the wood stove.

Of course, not all signatures are so basic.  Some have a few more sentences to mention a summary of the year that has gone by.  And actually, I do appreciate those.  Granted I would better appreciate an actual conversation where I can learn more than what I notice in that glance.  Where we could share a glass of wine or cup of coffee and engage in a conversation – the like of which we may have had once long ago, but for some reason our contact is now reduced to a handwritten note or two, a postage stamp… and maybe, yeah, some disengaged Facebook posts (although there is a strong chance you’ve already blocked my political rants).  But I get it.  Time is fleeting… and the fact one does take the time to think of me once a year long enough to write a sentence or two… with no inquiry into my wellbeing or status quo… it means well.  I know.  It just seems short change to get that generic card compared to the kinship that got me on this mailing list in the first place.

Sometimes the generic card is a little more personal.  A nice collage of pictures… of your family… probably mostly, your children.  I enjoy those a little bit more.  Not that I don’t already see those photos on Facebook.  But… here’s the confessional rub… these mass mailings actually don’t always bring a smile to my face.  Christmas is probably the most brutal reminder that I am not a mother, something with which I am about 98% okay the rest of the year.  This holiday more than any other day… when I spend the day with my family who really don’t want to talk about anything else except all the babies and coo over how great everyone else’s life is now they have a baby whereas before it wasn’t a fulfilled life or the understanding and capability of love wasn’t good enough… well, it kind of sticks a knife through my heart.  It’s not like those cards intend to provoke that reaction.  Certainly not.  Of course not.   But… it’s not like I can or would send a photograph of my manuscript or the calendar full of theater to all my people to say – hey, this is what makes my life full and happy.  Merry whatever... 

… but the fact is I don’t send cards anyway.  Because I’m not good at just a few sentences.  I’m even less capable of sending a thing and just signing my name.  Maybe not everyone enjoys such verbose exchanges.  I used to send letters… really long letters… but I never got any back.  So I stopped.  And so I stopped liking things that came in the mail.  So maybe this is really all about me and my disappointment in the decline death of an epistolary culture. Because all there is now are Christmas cards.  With stock photos and Shutterfly collages of iphone images.  That I have to figure out what to do with whatever day after the holiday season ends and I clear off the mantel that I really should dust again anyway with all that soot from the woodstove and decide if I hold onto those two – maybe even forty seconds of thought a friend gave me when putting the card into an envelope… or recycle it to supply cardstock for next year’s printing of cards.