sprite writes
broodings from the burrow

December 12, 2021


virtual advent tour 2021: day 12
posted by soe 6:00 am

Virtual Advent Tour 2021 badge -- 400 px

With my Christmas tree decorated, the next thing on my holiday to-do list is to get my Christmas cards out. The past few years I’ve been bad about sending them out before the holidays, although last year I did at least get them in a post box on Christmas Eve night.

This year, though, I’m determined that the folks in the U.S. should get theirs before Christmas and those overseas will hopefully get theirs by New Year’s.

Christmas Card Time!

The first step is to find all the cards. Yes, we have a problem.

Sure, some people buy just the number of cards they need each year. But not us. Some cards just fit certain segments of our lives (see the ski and bike cards). Some benefit charities we support (bookish literary cards). Others are sweet or funny or fun. And some, like the pop-up cards, are just marked down ridiculously after the holidays that I had a hard time passing them up.

And to be fair, a couple of these boxes contain singletons of a certain size, consolidated down for storage.

Christmas Card Time!

Next up are the addresses. Yes, mostly old-school, in my organizer, which this year, is actually back to also being my work notebook. Yes, pulling it out on the weekend gave me a bit of agita.

Christmas Card Time!

I like to decorate my cards, so I have a vast sticker collection (as do, I suspect, a number of my fellow Gen X’ers who grew up in a period where we traded stickers). There are some missing, but it’s possible I’ll find them tucked into a box of cards, or maybe in the hot mess that is my desk these days.

Christmas Card Time!

Finally, we’ve got the pens (red and green and a non-Christmassy color for the New Year’s cards to those who aren’t celebrating Christian holidays) and stamps (I can’t begin to tell you the hunt these led me on in the past week, when I put them all in “safe places” during the party cleanup frenzy.

Yes, that is a laptop writing desk, and yes it looks like the sort of thing that might have been bought in elementary school. I did. For the past four decades, it’s mostly only been used at Christmas when writing cards, but these days I also use it as a stable surface under my laptop for video calls or when the battery gets too hot. Either way, thanks, ten-year-old me.

Would you like a Christmas card, dear reader? If you aren’t already on my list, leave me a comment and I’ll email you for your street address.

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