White Christmases in the Northwest Corner -- at least, on this western side of the Cascades -- are unlikely this year, as always. And even Christmas cards are becoming rarer.
Looking back over blog posts of years past, I see repeated lamentations over the dying custom of sending Christmas cards. In 2008, I wrote:
Let's face it. Maybe in 2008, with email and Facebook so readily available, no one really does care if I send them a card or not. But I send them for myself, at least in part. Christmas just doesn't feel like Christmas until I carry my stack of envelopes down to the corner and drop them in the mailbox.
In that post, twelve years ago, I sounded a little discouraged, but still feisty. By 2016, after a disturbing election, I was becoming disturbed at my fellow Americans, writing in a post entitled "Happy whatever":
Maybe -- except in the bosom of our nuclear families -- we should all just sit around a plain pole and exchange ironic witticisms. Or did Seinfeld beat me to it? Happy Festivus?
Or maybe the entire nation can coalesce around a December festival in honor of Momus, the Greek god of irony, sarcasm, and ridicule. The last god that educated Americans have in common.
My Christmas card post in 2018 was entitled "Dying custom." And last Christmas, in "Moribund," I wrote:
And at what point do we pull the sheet over the moribund patient and snap our fingers to summon the eagerly awaiting mortician?
Merry Digital Christmas!
What more can I say? Just R.I.P.?
Not quite, but almost. I wrote my relatives a week or so ago that -- amidst all the other losses occasioned by the Covid-19 pandemic -- this would be the first year since I was 18 and a college freshman than I wouldn't be sending out Christmas cards. As expected, no one complained. My sister asked, non-commitedly, "why?" Fine, I thought. The comedy is over. Curtain.
Then, this past week I received a card -- one very nice card -- from a very nice family who I rarely see in person, but with whom I've always exchanged cards. Do I cut off this one continuing link, and thus the friendship? And do I want to hurt their feelings by not reciprocating? After all these years?
"Conscience doth make cowards of us all."
I dragged out last year's card list. By last year, it was only one-third as long as it had been fifteen or twenty years ago. The pruning had been going on for some time. On the list were some names who hadn't reciprocated for a couple of years or so. Delete. There were people who I see or with whom I talk on Facebook constantly. Delete. There were still a number of names left. Ok. I give up.
I went, masked, to the University Bookstore. They had hardly any cards for sale this year, but I bought a box of some that weren't too bad. I'm sending them to the very few people left on my list, plus some close relatives who may or may not send cards most years.
If last year's post was titled "Moribund," this year's should be "Moribunder." But it isn't.
Merry Christmas!
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