The Christmas card, I think, has gone the way of stationery, the abacus, the dial phone, and good handwriting. I’ve received a few cards so far this year; I might receive a few more – they are hurriedly signed, not annotated with news or good wishes; in one case the card was not signed but rather pre-printed with the names of all four family members. I received one jaunty email “card” replete with dancing snowman in a Santa Clause suit.
I remember the rainy afternoon when I bought the screech owl card. I felt cheap that day and didn’t want to spend anything at all on a card that no one, I guessed, would bother to look at twice. That’s what I thought as I stood in front of the display of bird-themed cards in my favorite bird-supply store. One box had been mis-priced – or else it was a carryover from last year’s stock – for it was three dollars less than the boxes of cardinal-, woodpecker-, and geese-graced cards. That’s why I chose it – the owl cards cost three dollars less.
I always used to ponder long and hard about the handwritten message I would write on each greeting card, even if only to rephrase the pre-printed message inside. But lately I’ve begun to feel like “one hand a-clapping” – still trying to be personal and chatty in this age when so much more can be updated through email, facebook, twitter, text message, or whatever else. Yes, my owl of the silent night would like to say something new and personal – but she’s been rendered silent by all the up-to-the-minute clamor of the daylight hours.
I remember when my mother would set up the card table in the living room for a week in December in order to methodically work each evening on the Xmas card list – many pages of addresses, saved and refined over many years, written in double columns, front and back, a list folded and refolded to the tearing point – the names and addresses of all those many friends, old neighbors, distant relatives, church members, square dance partners, army buddies, high school friends, etc. Occasionally there would be a name crossed off – and that had meaning too. Also on that card table were several boxes of greeting cards . . . a red pen . . . sheets of postage stamps bearing the Madonna-and-Child image. These stamps were not self-adhesive, but had to be licked. That was my job, as a child, to lick and place the stamp just-so in the upper right hand corner of the envelope – and also to lick the envelope flaps closed.
At that time an envelope could travel for a penny less if its flap were tucked in rather than sealed to its body – and it could only be tucked in legally if no written words other than a signature had been invested inside. And so there were two piles of envelopes on the card table back then, those whose flaps were tucked in because they contained no personal message, and those whose flaps were to be licked shut because they contained a handwritten greeting – a chatty, personal, loving, long, and wishful annual message written in red ink on a separate sheet of tablet paper that was folded and placed inside the card – and that cost one extra penny to mail.
The two stacks towered higher each day on the card table as the annual job of keeping in touch progressed – the chatty pile, I remember, outpacing the other by twice or thrice until it fell over and had to be made into more piles.
