People die, people divorce, we leave jobs and lose touch with coworkers, children grow up and don’t play with our children anymore (so we no longer must play nice with their parents), funds get scarce (more cards, more money), people cut us from their Christmas card lists, so we cut them from ours (I suggest a two-year grace period)—you can delete someone from your holiday mailing spreadsheet for plenty of good reasons. But sometimes things get personal.
My friend in Florida says, “If their yearly updates are a prolonged epistle of bragging about all of their children’s accomplishments, that gets them cut.” A New York City friend says, “We had a friend who for some reason stopped inviting us to his annual June Pride party, and after years of being the bigger person and still sending him a card, I decided, f **k it, he’s dead to me.”
I’ve cut back, too. I order seventy-five cards (down from a hundred) from my friend Kathleen, who runs a letterpress out of her Birmingham, Alabama, basement. And yes, they’re custom, because where else am I going to find a mistletoe’d disco ball with my husband and me wishing you a “Solid Gold Lexmas” in Prism font? Kathleen says, “Each Christmas, some people see me and say, ‘Oh, I just couldn’t get it together this year to send out a card’ or ‘I just did an electronic card because it was so much easier.’ Like they’re confessing to their dentist that they’re not flossing as they should.”
I wonder if one day e-cards, elf GIFs, Facebook posts, and “Santa Baby” TikToks will finally bring my beloved snail-mail tradition to an end. Could be. A friend’s twenty-year-old daughter finds the idea of buying stamps, writing an address on an envelope, and getting it to the mailbox exhausting (so many steps!). “Besides,” she and her boyfriend agree, “we think it’s only something rich people do to show off that they have money.”
But I have friends who buy their cards for the next year on Black Friday. I have friends who cut off the fronts of cards they receive and repurpose them as postcards or gift tags. Some cut cards into strips and hot-glue them into garland, or line them like toy soldiers on mantels, or stick them in wire snowflakes, or tie a bow around each year’s haul, bring out the bundles from past years, and put them all in a large bowl like clove-spiked oranges. People who send Christmas cards like Christmas cards, and that’s all there is to it.
So we’re the only ones who’ll notice if you cut us from your list.
Nobody else will care because no matter what you do—pose your family in matching polos like a cult of golf caddies or write a merry manifesto oversharing that Pop Pop lost three toes to “the Diabetes”—your card won’t be as missed as Tom Cruise’s infamous annual coconut cake would be. No Interview with the Vampire residual coconut cake is a stake in the heart. No card from you isn’t the slight you imagine it might be. Whatever your reasons, get over yourself, get out your red pen, and have at it. Or don’t.
Another friend has never crossed anyone (living) off his list. He says, “You never know when you may want or need something from someone, and it’s worth the $3.50 to send the card.” Perhaps best to leave that door to the golf-caddie cult open?
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