Recently Missive Maven wrote a really interesting post about Christmas cards and I thought perhaps I'd add my two cents worth to the topic as well. You can read her post here.
My stand on holiday cards is this: I don't send them. Not because I don't celebrate religious holidays, or whatever. There's two reasons I don't send them and they're pretty simple:
1) I basically see Christmas cards and so on as tools to help those who don't usually write letters or notes. As I already write loads of letters, notes, postcards, etc, I'm happy to just keep on doing that.
2) I really don't want to presume that the person I'm writing to celebrates the Annual Feast of the Harpooned Goat-herder, or whatever.
Christmas is a big deal in my family. We're not religious but in typical Aussie fashion we all get together over a roast turkey and a few beers at Christmas time and exchange a few gifts. For me, it's more about family and I travel about 700kms every year to spend Christmas with mine. Sometimes it's the only day in the whole year that we all manage to get together, so on that level Christmas is incredibly meaningful to me. It also signals great weather, a few days of lazing around at the beach and, hopefully a cracking thunderstorm somewhere in the mix.
In Australia, we don't have Thanksgiving (for obvious reasons) and Halloween and Easter aren't treated as very big deals. Easter is the time everyone heads to the bush or the beach for a nice long weekend. But Christmas is a huge deal here and Christmas cards have always played a starring role. It never ceases to amaze me how people who hardly know what a stamp looks like the other 11 months of the year pile into the post office with their precarious stack of Chrissy cards to everyone they've ever known, including the postman.
I have no problem at all with people sending holiday cards, and they can send them to me if they wish. I'll happily write back, it just won't be on a Christmas card.
Love from Kaz
Annual Feast of the Harpooned Goat-herder! Man ... you have wild holidays in Australia :-) I'm going to find me some harpoons and a goat-herder and ummm .... feast on him? If I only feast my eyes, and don't stick the harpoon anywhere fleshy, it can still be a vegetarian celebration.
ReplyDeleteInteresting...I read the Missive Maven's too and now your comments. I actually love holiday cards and collect vintage ones to play with and send BUT I agree about getting cards from people who never write all year and send you a holiday card with just their name scrawled on it and nothing more! I want a fun card and some photos and a letter in it! Maybe a recipe. I want it packed. But that's just me. (And I rarely get anything fun like that so....) Funny, I celebrate everything and anything too -- Lunar New Year, The Moon Festival, you name it and I'm in!
ReplyDeleteHear hear! Well said, and I do appreciate the link.
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