Christmas card complications

I love Christmas cards, so I send them to everyone I know! Actually, I send them to everyone for whom I have a home address. That limits it a lot, particularly in this day and age, when we hardly use snail mail for anything anymore. I’d be sending three times as many cards if I could just get all my friends, acquaintances, ex-coworkers, and people who stood in line with me in the grocery store, to just take a moment and send me their address. Ok, just joking, maybe not that last category.

Some of them are a stretch. I can imagine some of my recipients thinking, “Who are these people? Why are they sending us a card? Who is this ‘Laura’ and ‘Darren’ they’re talking about? And why do we care if they both want a dog?”

Last year John and I had gone to Tucson in November, and we bought cute little cards by a local artist at the gift shop at the botanical garden. But this year we didn’t find anything boxed at the little shops we went to in Tucson. And we didn’t manage to get out to the cute little shops here in Albuquerque. Which is how we found ourselves in Walgreens on Saturday, digging though boxes of horrible Christmas cards, trying to find enough boxes of any one given pattern.

There’s nothing that says I have to send the same card to everyone on my list. But if I have a mixed set of cards, here’s what my brain does. My brain starts trying to decide who should get which kind of card. This is a problem! It slows me down, it’s frustrating, and I don’t know, I don’t have a perfect answer. Some of my recipients I know fairly well and can imagine which card they might prefer. Others I barely know at all. And yet, I still try to figure out which card they might like. Obviously I should tell myself to just send the cards to people randomly and not worry about it. But my brain won’t let me. Thus, I insist on several boxes of the same card.

Rummaging around in a rush in Walgreens the other day, we managed to find several boxes of the same card, the picture was pretty, so great, we were out of there. Done! It wasn’t until I sat down to get them all signed, assembled, and mailed that I realized we had purchased Christian Christmas cards.

I asked John, “Is this ok?” He’s like, “I don’t care.” Do we care? Should we care? And more to the point: are our recipients going to care?

It’s gotten more complicated over the years. It used to be I’d just buy a pretty card, write “Merry Christmas” and send ’em out. Then I started to try to be more sensitive to people of various faiths and non-faiths, and I started writing “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”.

But I hear that “Happy Holidays” isn’t considered neutral anymore, it’s seen as a reaction against “Merry Christmas”, which is not really my intent.

In fact, it seems like being “neutral” nowadays is considered “bad”, as if neutral means apathy or lack of caring. It seems to me it would be useful if a whole lot more of us were actively, openly neutral – or maybe I need a new word for that. A word for a middle way.

So here I was with Christian Christmas cards, and a recipient list that ranged from Christians to atheists to everything in between, plus a whole lot of people whom I simply have no idea what their opinions might be regarding the meaning of Christmas.

Should I apologize for the Christian cards in my letter and risk disappointing those of my friends and family who are Christian? Should I add some sort of inclusive message to try to counter balance the fact that I sent Christian cards? Should I go out and buy a whole new set of cards?

Then it occurred to me that we have a few relatives on John’s side who are Jehovah’s Witnesses. They don’t celebrate Christmas. And here I’ve been cheerfully sending them Christmas cards all these years. Which I guess they haven’t minded, but it does seem sort of insensitive of me. But I don’t want to just leave them out, because then everyone else gets the Christmas letter except them. So I printed a couple of modified letters to say “Happy New Years” and printed those on non-holiday pretty paper, and left out the card and just sent the Happy New Years letter. But I’m still doubtful. I think New Years is ok?

And what about all those people I don’t know very well who maybe also don’t want religious Christmas cards? And part of me is like, “Kristina, you are over-thinking this!” But part of me is also like, well, I’m getting old. And the younger generations are saying things that are new to me.

So maybe we should all put our thinking caps on.