Some Christmas Card Thoughts...

Growing up, we never received Christmas cards from friends or family.  It's a very American thing to do Christmas cards, kind of like thank you cards, which are entirely foreign to anyone with an immigrant parent (who has not adapted to the American culture), but just basic decorum in the American culture.  So when we started doing Christmas cards after we got married, my parents and family were a little surprised.  It was a good surprise, I'm sure, but surprised nevertheless.  It became even more of a necessity to update everyone as I slowly became more distanced from my extended family after we left LA for Washington and then Utah.  We go back about once or twice a year to visit now, but there's not always time to visit with the extended family, so like many things, it has become less and less and associated with my childhood more than my adulthood.

Every year, we send a little bit of an update on our family, what we've done, how our year's been, how and what the kids are sort of like.  Obviously, these letters don't tell of the true day in and day out that we experience, but we hope they shed a bit of light on our year and will give us some sort of context on what we did and what our kids did years later.  Because no letter could truly detail how mortifying it is when you go to music class with your sons and they lay on you like a big baby or how quickly it manifests into loving pride when they show some light has flickered and they get music theory.  Or the tangible cuteness of my baby's little bum high in the air as he bear crawls everywhere.  Or the level of joy that comes when my daughter tells me how much she loves the food I've cooked and gobbles it down patiently at the table like a big kid.

And I've thought about this a lot, about who I really should be sending our Christmas cards to, who even cares to read our letters, and what they mean to us and others.  I made the smart decision to send 100 actual cards to friends and family who want them or send us cards, and then I also send a bunch via email to old coworkers, old college buddies, and even old college professors.  The response from my emailed cards was above and beyond what I could have expected.  I got responses with updates from old partners I worked with, professors who expressed such zeal for an update and requested I make sure to include them on my annual card list every year going forward.  Old friends who are off the grid who told me they had new babies, I mean the response was overwhelming and absolutely amazing.  Bundled in with that group, my parents also received a soft copy of our card.  That might sound cruel or unthoughtful, but my parents mail is a pile of bills and notices lost, one that has grown too immense for them to adequately control, and I know better than to send them a card they will just read and then toss aside.  For them, the soft copy is almost better because they can store it and refer back to it whenever they want with a simple search.

But still, my American side was apprehensive about what sort of response my mom would have.  I finally got on the phone with her after I had sent the card and she was so happy.  She told me how many times she had read it over and over, how much she loved reading the card, and how wonderful it was.  Then, she told me that when they had first moved to the US and were still living in Missouri, someone they knew was very "Americanized," and would send them a card every single year giving them an update on their family.  She referred to is as the most ridiculous thing she had ever read, so san-ba (a phrase that means foolish, and is a homonym with the number 3 and 8, so sometimes we say that's so 38! - don't be fooled by the Internet who refers to 38 as a female dog, that is definitely NOT the translation).  But then, she admitted, now that she's receiving my cards and understands the cultural impact of Christmas cards, she can't stop gushing over mine and will read it over and over again, because she loves hearing about her daughter's family.  I couldn't help but laugh, because maybe part of that struggle I had with whether or not I should do a card, how much to write, who to send it to, and how... was not so far from the fact that my own mom thought it a bit insane to send anything even resembling a family update.  So now I know.