My old boyfriend's (Brother Bill) Christmas card
arrived a bit late--December 2, instead of the 1st. His is always the
very first Christmas card we get. He is apparently having health
problems that he didn't go into this year and I was sorry to hear that.
I take Bill's annual card as a challenge.
It is my personal challenge to get our Christmas letter written and e-mailed
to him before I get his card. This year I completely forgot about it
and it took his card to remind me.
But I got my letter written (it is linked in
the left column if you want to read it). The venom over Christmas
letters seems to have lessened a bit but each year you know there are going
to be some who "hate...hate...hate" them.
I can never figure out why someone would be
upset at getting something that someone has spent time creating to share
with friends and would prefer to get a card with a pre-printed name and no
message whatsoever. But to each his own.
I have been sending out Christmas letters
ever since we got married (52 of them!) In the beginning the
preparation was much more elaborate because I took my paste up to a real
printer and had them printed to mail out. They always included a
family picture or more
This was our family picture in 1969, Paul's
first Christmas.
The printed cards started to get spendy, when
you considered not only the price of the printer but also the rising cost of
postage. It was costing me nearly $200 just to send greetings that
most people would glance at and then throw away. I started xeroxing
the letter to save money but the photos always looked liked...well, xeroxed
photos.
Email was a godsend because I could reach a
good number of our friends and email greetings without having to whittle the
list down to an affordable postage list. And then when Funny the World
came along and I realized that I could design a web page and just send out
the link to the site, I had found Nirvana. I could do what I loved to
do, I could design a prettier card and still reach all our friends, and now
even acquaintances that I would like to greet during the holiday season
I probably go overboard on who is on our
list, but I really love sharing the card.
I heard a story this morning of someone who
had regifted something that turned into kind of a nightmare. I don't
have any regifting stories of my own, but I do remember the Christmas that
Walt's mother gave my mother the gift she had given her the previous
year. I loved that we always had a blended family, from the first year of
our marriage. Walt's mother came to my parents' house for Christmas
and forever more, until distance or health made that an impossibility,
wherever we were having Christmas the two families always spent it together.
Now, of course, that there are other in-law families to consider it's
different. It helped that Walt's brother and sister didn't marry until
late!
But the regifting story got me to thinking
about memorable Christmas gifts I have received. Not memorable in the
"Oh Wow you got me a ....." story, but the strange gifting incidents.
Like the Christmas that I begged and begged my mother to let me open just
one gift. I was in grammar school and it was a gift a classmate had
given me. I don't know why this is such an indelible memory, but I
even remember where I was sitting when I opened the gift and how
disappointed I was because it was a piggy bank. I don't even know why I was
disappointed but I guess I expected something more exciting.
Then there was the year I got the camera.
Something I dearly wanted. In those days, department stores delivered
your purchases for you and when this box came, my mother said it had my
gift(s) in it. She said there were something like five gifts in it and
decided to just wrap the box it had been sent in. I was thrilled to
get a camera, but the multi gifts she was talking about were the various
parts of the camera--the flash attachment, the bulbs, the batteries and
don't remember what else. That little Brownie box camera changed me
into a photographer, but I always felt cheated that I didn't have four
other gifts in the box.
Then there was the year that I got a big box
from the family for whom I babysat. The father was a big joker and
from the time when I went with them on their vacation to Lake Tahoe, he gave
me a hard time about not eating my vegetables. I was so excited to
open their gift, and then so terribly, terribly hurt that it was just full
of limp vegetables. I wasn't going to let them know that I wasn't a
good sport, though, and called to thank them fort he vegetables. "Did
it take you a long time to find the present?" the father asked. Turned
out he had hidden a book of movie tickets in the tissue paper under the
vegetables. I might never have found them if I hadn't decided to be a
good sport and thank him for the vegetables.
There
was the year of the Mary Hartline doll, which I've spoken of before. I
wasn't into baby dolls any more and so desperately wanted one of those big
fancy dolls that look like a young woman from Tara or somewhere. I
watched a show called Big Circus at that time and the hostess was
Mary Hartline and I guess my mother thought that any non-baby doll would
make me happy. I knew when I saw her under the tree that I would never
get the kind of doll I really wanted .. and I never did.
The final gift memory I have is from when I
was in high school. My mother was so excited about the gift she
had given me and she teased me about it for weeks. Then I was
somewhere babysitting and watching television and the girl on the TV was
wearing a faux fur bolo jacket kind of like this one:
I knew instantly that this was the gift I was
getting...and it was (only in grey). I never liked it but I never let
my mother know and acted excited, but I think I only wore it twice.
I guess this makes me sound like an
ungrateful kid. I received a lot of wonderful gifts throughout my
childhood and adulthood, but these stand out as some of the most "memorable"
gifts I have ever opened.
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