Saving words might not be what saves Christmas

Saving words might not be what saves Christmas
                        

Here’s something that’s bothered me for years.

What do people do with their Christmas cards after the holiday season is over?

Do they just throw them out?

That seems wrong, like burning old report cards or trashing 45s you probably won’t listen to ever again. Some things you just keep.

Or am I just a rank sentimentalist with a hoarder’s tendencies and an unhealthy attachment to the past? That’s entirely possible.

I mean how many folks do you know who have held onto ticket stubs from concerts they went to 40 or 50 years ago or refused to part with T-shirts they bought there?

Who can still fit into those anymore?

Time is the problem, much as it has always been. You cannot defeat it, and about the best you can hope for is fighting it to a draw.

Even that’s a pyrrhic victory. American landfills are overflowing with the detritus, the flotsam and jetsam of lives long since over.

But how do we, the still living and breathing, decide when something that once meant so much is now essentially valueless?

If you’re like me, you remember the ending of “Citizen Kane” not as an indictment of a life lived in vain but rather a reminder even something as mundane and ordinary as a child’s sled can make a tremendous difference as one faces the inevitable end.

“Rosebud” may be the most studied final line in the history of movies but maybe, just maybe, it’s as simple as growing older.

Sending Christmas cards is a seasonal act of faith anchored stubbornly to the past. There’s no guaranteed return on investment and precious little in the way of generating new recipients since, let’s face it, making friends at this late date is just too much work.

Like Santa’s naughty-or-nice list, this one is intractable and final.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t considerable drama inherent to the process, an annual angst-ridden decision that revolves around a single, solitary question: Is this the year I finally give up on jotting individual notes inside each and every one of them?

You’d think, me being a writer of some small repute, I’d relish the opportunity to flash my brilliance in short, clever bursts of hand-written semi-smart excellence, believing folks on the receiving end of such generosity would be bowled over, in awe.

Alas, it’s a play without an audience, a song sung in the shower.

Nonetheless, over the course of many, many Christmases past, that’s exactly what I’ve done. A drink at one elbow with an ashtray at the other, I’ve composed hundreds of pithy, poignant, personal missives, every word a pearl, with Brenda Lee, the Beach Boys, Burl Ives, Bing Crosby and David Bowie providing the soundtrack.

I’m my own Christmas card frontice, seated at the dining room table, scribbling away, with a pile of envelopes gradually being stuffed with words I’ll never read again.

And then, this year — an awful, hideous one filled with despair and disease — I realized something I hadn’t before considered.

Most cards come with their own messages already printed inside. That’s what some people actually do for a living, is it not?

What makes me think a reference to my old bowling team or a memory of pizza in the park is better than “Wishing you the Love, Peace and Happiness that the true meaning of Christmas brings.”

It’s perfect and part of what I paid for when I bought the box.

Besides — and this is crucial — my handwriting is so illegible when I settle in for an hours-long scribbling siege that deciphering it is, in and of itself, a plaintive cry for a Christmas miracle.

So this year I just signed my name: simple, sincere and swift.

Well, my wife added hers as well, but you get the point.

Why is it then I feel so bad when, upon opening a card from a friend or a family member or a faithful reader, I read a personal note aimed directly at me and my warped sense of Christmas guilt?

I sometimes wish I had them all back again, stacked like poker chips waiting for three kings to wondrously appear out of the blue.

But it’s too late for that. I have to play the cards I’ve been dealt.

Allow me to quote the Grinch, appropriating one of his best lines:

“Their mouths will hang open a minute or two … Then the Whos down in Who-ville will all cry BOO-HOO!”

Later, of course, the Grinch gets religion and embraces the whole “Christmas doesn’t come from a store” gospel, and that’s well and good, as far as it goes, but he never really apologizes for his sins.

That’s what I mean to do now. If my lack of personal words offended you when you opened my card, consider these, please. If I didn’t send you one, think of the postage I saved with this essay.


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