Holiday Countdown

By TAD BARTIMUS

My intention is always the same: 60 Christmas cards, no more. Absolutely not another one. I buy three boxes, 20 to a box, and 60 stamps. Then I start through addresses I've got scattered in all manner of files, notebooks and two outdated Rolodexes.

It's hopeless. Each name conjures up a face, some connected to a time and place mostly forgotten until the holidays jog my memory, others representing new friends I'd like to know better. But who has time to write pen-in-hand letters? Get real. Start with your matron-of-honor and your mother-in-law and work down. Sixty. That's it.

If we don't make a special effort to reach out at the holidays we'll lose each other. Which really means we'll lose a piece of ourselves.

Two weeks and counting; I'm not going to make it. A photocopied Christmas letter begins to take shape in my harried mind. Then I get the annual one from my parents' neighbors who moved away when I was 18 and haven't been seen since; they bought a new car (two paragraphs), took a trip to Branson (one paragraph), buried Aunt So-and-So (a sentence), got their hemorrhoids fixed (three paragraphs). Nix the Christmas letter idea, I can't take the peer pressure.

Time to get ruthless. The brother of my first roommate? CUT! My high school music teacher? CUT! A one-time boss who never got me a raise? CUT!

I take out last year's haul and thumb through it. The best ones are the photo cards. A friend's kids are dressed in look-a-like tartan vests, red bow ties for the boys, red hair ribbons for the girls. Cute. Can't throw that away. If I don't send them a card I won't get another picture. Won't be able to watch the kids grow up, year to year, as I have with so many little ones who now send me pictures of their own children.

I lose myself in the newsletters and hand-written missives that come aflurry the last two weeks of the season. The rest of the year the mail is bills, credit card come-ons, charitable appeals, catalogs and grocery ads. At holiday time I re-capture the thrill of receiving real mail written by a real person with tales to tell. Even if it IS just about their cat or a new computer. No matter. I read and re-read the cards, then save them to read again, because they are yardsticks of time.

Enclosed snapshots, spidery handwriting and hurriedly jotted bits and pieces of family history are as eagerly awaited as the cards themselves. Maybe more so. I know the toaster will eventually break, the book will get read, the bath gel used up. But the people on my Christmas card list, distant though we are, move forward with me year after year, share their lives so that we can stay connected. If we don't make a special effort to reach out at the holidays we'll lose each other. Which really means we'll lose a piece of ourselves.

The road back to the card shop is paved with good intentions. I couldn't cut anybody off my list because that would mean next year they'd cut me off theirs; just think of all the gall bladder operations and senior prom pictures I'd miss.

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