Christmas Letters
I'm not sure we sent out a Christmas letter the first year we were married (1960) but we have sent one out every year since. Sometimes it got to be about 130 letters - give or take a few.
Sometimes relatives didn't like what I wrote so I wrote them off our Christmas list. Then they asked my mother if we had stopped writing Christmas letters. So we put some of the relatives back on.
You have to understand that most of my relatives come from a fundamentalist church - The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. In fact I was a pastor in that church for 25 years before they asked me to leave. They taught me to be a rebel and I became such a good one that they kicked me out.
I use to be a stamp collector. When my mother was working she got mail from around the world and saved the stamps for me. Then I bought some. I would buy whole sheets when I could afford to, or I would buy just the four or six block of each new stamp. When we moved to Mississippi the town postmaster and the university postmaster didn't order all the new stamps. So my chain of new stamps was broken. I wrote to the Postmaster General in Washington, D.C. I got a phone call from his office. The two postmasters in Starkville, MS called me and asked me to come in. They both met me together. They begged me not to contact the D.C. postoffice but rather call them if I had a problem. Actually my phone call to D.C. was in response that my first class church mail did not get to our membership. The new issue of stamps was secondarily a concern. So for the next six months I got a phone call and a postcard telling me a new stamp was coming out.
Unfortunately I didn't think about the humidity and I did not store my stamps properly. So over the years my stamps got damaged - whole sheets of stamps - everything from first class to 44 cent stamps. So over the past few years I have been using up these stamps that I've salvaged. Very few did I have to actually throw away.
This year we have another round of letters. I am sure I have enough stamps for this year yet. But this may be the last year that people get 10 or 12 stamps on their letter to make the proper first-class postage.
Now isn't that more than you wanted to know? (For the few of you that read this to the end.)
Sometimes relatives didn't like what I wrote so I wrote them off our Christmas list. Then they asked my mother if we had stopped writing Christmas letters. So we put some of the relatives back on.
You have to understand that most of my relatives come from a fundamentalist church - The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. In fact I was a pastor in that church for 25 years before they asked me to leave. They taught me to be a rebel and I became such a good one that they kicked me out.
I use to be a stamp collector. When my mother was working she got mail from around the world and saved the stamps for me. Then I bought some. I would buy whole sheets when I could afford to, or I would buy just the four or six block of each new stamp. When we moved to Mississippi the town postmaster and the university postmaster didn't order all the new stamps. So my chain of new stamps was broken. I wrote to the Postmaster General in Washington, D.C. I got a phone call from his office. The two postmasters in Starkville, MS called me and asked me to come in. They both met me together. They begged me not to contact the D.C. postoffice but rather call them if I had a problem. Actually my phone call to D.C. was in response that my first class church mail did not get to our membership. The new issue of stamps was secondarily a concern. So for the next six months I got a phone call and a postcard telling me a new stamp was coming out.
Unfortunately I didn't think about the humidity and I did not store my stamps properly. So over the years my stamps got damaged - whole sheets of stamps - everything from first class to 44 cent stamps. So over the past few years I have been using up these stamps that I've salvaged. Very few did I have to actually throw away.
This year we have another round of letters. I am sure I have enough stamps for this year yet. But this may be the last year that people get 10 or 12 stamps on their letter to make the proper first-class postage.
Now isn't that more than you wanted to know? (For the few of you that read this to the end.)