Over-achieving Christmas Cards
Christmas cards are a huge production in our
house. I'm pretty sure other people have it easier. But we
do a family newsletter. It has a picture in it, and a short article
about each person and snips of news. It's heavily edited until it fits
on one single sheet of paper. I print out envelopes from my
mailing list program and the kids all decorate the envelopes with
personal messages. We gather around the table and make an
afternoon of it as a family.
We send this newsletter out to pretty much everyone we've ever known and some people we've NEVER known. (I'm serious. I send my holiday newsletter to my Grandmother's favorite niece that I have never once met.)
I take a long view with these family newsletters. My husband is 50. He has friends he hasn't seen in 20 years, but in another 20 years they'll all be retired and child-free and ready to start playing tennis together again. Spending a stamp once a year for 40 years keeps the connection alive until they can reforge it. And my experience is that these connections DO get reforged. We frequently get drop-in visits from friends we haven't seen in years. I think it's largely due to our holiday newsletters. People feel like they still know us, and as a reward we still get to know them.
We sent out 107 cards this year. My mailing list actually has 187 people on it, but I've dropped 80 people through the years - mostly casual friends we don't see anymore. I'm slow to drop people. It's hard for me to do.
I dropped a handful again this year. Today we got a card from someone we dropped. I'm feeling guilty. I feel like NOT sending them a card is like admitting we're never really going to see them again. But we're not. Am I doing the right thing to not rush off a card to them after getting theirs? Is it okay to not reciprocate for a few years? What's the etiquette here?
As soon as I can figure out how to convert a Word document to a PDF I'll upload it to our family's website. I'll put the link in a Friends-only entry. Please comment if you want to be friended, OR if you have a clue how to convert MS Word 2003 into a PDF. (I used to be able to do it in an older version of Word IIRC.)
We send this newsletter out to pretty much everyone we've ever known and some people we've NEVER known. (I'm serious. I send my holiday newsletter to my Grandmother's favorite niece that I have never once met.)
I take a long view with these family newsletters. My husband is 50. He has friends he hasn't seen in 20 years, but in another 20 years they'll all be retired and child-free and ready to start playing tennis together again. Spending a stamp once a year for 40 years keeps the connection alive until they can reforge it. And my experience is that these connections DO get reforged. We frequently get drop-in visits from friends we haven't seen in years. I think it's largely due to our holiday newsletters. People feel like they still know us, and as a reward we still get to know them.
We sent out 107 cards this year. My mailing list actually has 187 people on it, but I've dropped 80 people through the years - mostly casual friends we don't see anymore. I'm slow to drop people. It's hard for me to do.
I dropped a handful again this year. Today we got a card from someone we dropped. I'm feeling guilty. I feel like NOT sending them a card is like admitting we're never really going to see them again. But we're not. Am I doing the right thing to not rush off a card to them after getting theirs? Is it okay to not reciprocate for a few years? What's the etiquette here?
As soon as I can figure out how to convert a Word document to a PDF I'll upload it to our family's website. I'll put the link in a Friends-only entry. Please comment if you want to be friended, OR if you have a clue how to convert MS Word 2003 into a PDF. (I used to be able to do it in an older version of Word IIRC.)