Sans Fig Leaf
"Pretty Papers"
22 December, 2000
When I was a little kid, I loved Christmas cards. I liked seeing what the pictures were, what kind of inks were used, how the die-cuts created visual effects. The words, verses, or greeting printed inside weren't very important, unless there was a joke I understood. But I loved the cards themselves. I would get excited when I saw an envelope in the day's mail that looked as if it might be a card.
I also enjoyed helping my mom prepare our cards for sending out. Given the sloppiness of my handwriting, I was usually relegated to licking stamps or some other harmless part of the process. But I got to help, and that was the important thing.
When I was a teen-ager I bought my first box of cards to send out. It was a strangely satisfying and adult-like experience, that first time. I picked the cards. I decided who to send them to. I wrote little notes inside. I did the sealing and stamping and everything.
It continued in that vein for many years. I attended college full time for a couple years, then dropped to part-time as I tried to figure out just what I really wanted to do with my life. Finally, I came here to Seattle, enrolled in a university, and finished. And every holiday season, I would buy a small number of cards and stamps (often constrained by my meager earnings) and send out a bit of holiday cheer to distant friends.
When I entered the world of full-time employment I went a little crazy with the Christmas cards. Dozens of relatives, friends, friends-not-seen-in-years, received Christmas cards. The entire operation became a major undertaking that was days in the planning and took most of a day to execute.
Then there was the follow-up activities. Christmas cards would arrive from people to whom I had not sent a card, so I had to send them one. Many of the people who received my cards felt obligated to send me one in return. Suddenly I had over a hundred pretty Christmas cards to display somewhere. I had to display them. They were all so pretty. Getting the pretty cards in the mail is what started this whole thing, right?
As the years went by the list grew and grew. Thank the goddess for after-Christmas sales, because that is where I acquired most of the cards to send out the following year, and made it financially feasible to keep sending all of the cards to all of those people.
And somewhere in there, it stopped being fun. The feeling of dread would set in about the time I realized that I needed to figure out how many stamps to buy. But now I felt obligated. What would people think if I just cut them out of the list? Would they feel insulted? Would they wonder if they had done something to offend me?
Fortunately, I was given a serious dose of perspective in 1997. My husband died less than two weeks before Thanksgiving. I wasn't in a festive mode that holiday season, obviously.
I didn't send Christmas cards. Oh, I bought some special ones--for my mother, for Ray's mother, and a few other immediate family members. But those were given along with presents. I didn't fire up the address database. I didn't dig the box full of cards out of the closet. I didn't spend a king's ransom on stamps.
And the world did not come to an end. None of my distant relatives were offended. I received no hurt inquiries from long-unseen friends. I did receive a few notes expressing genuine concern from some of those distant acquaintances. They received personal letters in the months that followed explaining what had happened. And the silver lining was that several of those old friendships were renewed because we had stepped out of the obligation-cycle inherent in the Christmas card ritual.
So, in 1998 I embarked on a new holiday card tradition. The little kid inside me who goes "ooooo!" when I see a really pretty card is still alive and well, so I can't ever stop doing the cards altogether. But I pruned the list. I deleted the names and addresses of everyone with whom I no longer had active contact. My personal list dropped from well over a hundred people to less than 30. Since I also oversee the sending of cards to all the members of the amateur publishing association for which I'm Editor-in-Chief, I still get to send a good pile of cards.
But the list is a lot more managable. I can actually take the time to think about who each card is going to, and though I may not write a personal note in each of them, I do spend a little time deciding which card to send each person, based on which one I think they would enjoy.
The holiday card exchange also becomes an ecumenical experience. A gay taoist and his pagan boyfriend exchange Christmas cards with their protestant, catholic, jewish, buddhist, pagan, and agnostic friends.
And I still get to look at a lot of pretty cards every year.