More goodbyes & cutting down the Christmas list

I’ve been so busy since my last post that it seems almost like another world. I still can’t believe what’s happened to Pete, and it’s made so much worse by the fact that his campus sent out an email announcing his death and funeral details and at the same time started discussing their efforts to find somebody to teach his spring semester courses. He taught practically everything under the sun, so I knew they would have a terrible time, but you’d think they could’ve at least waited a day or so before they started emailing everybody about his classes.

I’m trying not to think about it too much, and really I haven’t had much time to. I’ve been working like crazy on the Christmas presents for my family—not to let the cat out of the bag, but these are rather time consuming projects, and I think I can finally finish them tonight, thank God. I figured out how I wanted to do Christmas cards too. I always write a Christmas letter, and put something odd that Chris has done in as well—an article he wrote for the school newspaper, or a Photoshopped image. He didn’t have anything he particularly liked for this year’s letter, so I finally just went ahead and wrote it without that. People are really going to be disappointed—I know a lot of folks who look forward to seeing his stuff.

Every year, I find writing the letter so difficult—it’s an interesting exercise in audience awareness. You’re writing to so many different people—family, old family friends, colleagues from old jobs, old neighbors. Some people on my list we’ll never see again, and others I’ve never even met (Chris has a staggering number of aunts and uncles who live far far away). And how do you give out news without sounding like a braggart? How long is too long? I have a very good friend who sends out six page letters every year, in ten-point font. Even though she’s a friend, that’s just more than I want to know. Our letter’s usually a page and a half—probably too long. But I do try to make it funny. That was hard this year with Chris’s dad’s cancer, though. Next year’s probably won’t be any easier.

Once I get through the rhetorical difficulty of the yearly update, the rest is usually easy. This year, though, I cut a bunch of people off the list. The cards get so expensive, and we sent out about eighty last year. This year I cut back to sixty, and that still just seems like a ridiculous number. It’s so disheartening looking over the names of old friends and trying to decide who to keep in touch with. But I guess that since everybody I cut hasn’t sent me a card in several years (that was the elimination criteria I finally decided on), I suppose I could just decide that the removal from the Christmas list is just a formal recognition of what’s already the case.

This year I finally (after years and years of including photos and letters inside Christmas cards) realized that if I ordered the photo greeting cards my “holiday message” could be printed on the card and I wouldn’t have to handwrite notes in all those cards. It’s less personal, but so much faster—and I do try to keep in touch in other ways than the Christmas card too. I do feel rather guilty, but I must say it’s difficult to express how delighted I was with this revelation and the time saved as a result (and Chris even got the letter folded when he photocopied it!). So much for the cards I bought last year during the after-Christmas sales, though. I’m just glad it’s almost done. Stamps and they’re off tomorrow, arriving in mailboxes nationwide by at least New Year’s. Still, I haven’t beat the record of the year I wrote the letter Christmas Day, so I guess there’s something to be proud of.