The Weekend -- Once a Year Friends and Everyday Friends

I'm not much for the holidays. All the work involved with just three weeks out of the year seems out of control. All the Santa stuff and excessive lighting and decorative sweaters just isn't for me.

But I do get into Christmas cards.

This year, we sent out 100. Mostly because I'm insane and hate losing people. I have friends from different eras of my life. Though we don't talk anymore, I still want to know where they are and the bullet points of their lives. Are they married? Do they have a job? Kids? Have things turned out like they planned? I enjoy getting cards from them once a year and even reading those cheesy newsletters. I like the pictures of their kids dressed in their finest posed in front of a tree or at the Sears studio. Though we no longer speak, these once-a-year friends are still very much alive, and I imagine that if we got together, they would be very much the same.

Also, because I'm insane, I can't just send out a box of pre-made cards. We have to make them. All 100. This year, a photo was glued to a card. A border was made with pastels or stamps or poster paint, with the help of the kids. After much debate, we finally decided that labels weren't tacky, so we keyed in all the names into the computer. Notes were enclosed. Individual messages. Stamped. A whole weekend activity.

This morning, some once-a-year friends came by for brunch. Joy and Lawrence were in from London visiting family. Joy has a money job, Lawrence teaches at London School of Economics, and their son attends pre-school. Over quiche and bagels, they told us of their adventures in London. It's very expensive, because the lenient tax policies attract shady, rich people from around the world. It's no longer hip, because only shady, rich people live there. So, they're moving to Shanghei which is the new hip place. After they said good-bye to the suburban Jersey dwellers, the house felt very heavy.

But not for long, because I took a bus into Manhattan to visit my everyday friends, Margie and Susan. We only see each other every few weeks or so, but still talk on the phone everyday. I bought some $10 lamp shades with the picture of Vishnu at an outdoor bazaar. Then, the rain chased us into a cafe for the rest of the trip.

We dined on wine and potato pancakes. A lovely combination, I know. But Margie assured me that it was very Jewish, so we went with it.

Margie said that she started having Shabbat on Fridays for her girls. When she was growing up, her mother had married and remarried several times and hadn't had any consistent traditions or religions. She wanted her girls to have what she missed. Susan said that her cousin, the daughter of two older academics with no interest in holidays, also craved yearly rituals no matter how mundane.

As much as Christmas in Shanghei sounds fantastic, I might pay closer attention to what I take for granted. Like the 12 types of fish on Christmas Eve.

I caught the 8:15 bus back to New Jersey. I could have stayed later but I was missing my every minute people.

Comments

[Russell Arben Fox]

Melissa and I are big fans of Christmas cards, including the cheesy letters and the family photos, for basically exactly the same reasons you are Laura: we hate losing track of relatives and old friends. E-mail and blogs have made it terribly easy to stay in touch with distant friends and even make new ones, but the card matters to us: it means something to track down the address, summarize the year (and the summary is always a little different depending on who the card is going to, because some of these people who talk with on the phone, others you e-mail, a few you saw last summer and some have five-year-old twins you've yet to see in the flesh), and send them out into the postal void.

I have no idea if the sending of Christmas cards is in a slow or a sharp decline, but obviously between modern technology and modern living habits, the project of sitting down and sending out Christmas greetings is becoming rarer. Melissa and I grumble sometimes about how we usually average less than one Christmas card received for every two we send out, but the fact is we really do enjoy every one.

[Allison]

Handmaking 100 cards? You are, in fact, insane. But I want to get on your Christmas card list.

[mc]

So I'm de-lurking to say: 12 fish?!? In my family we only have seven -- all in one lovely stew, based on a marinara sauce and served over pasta. It's what I miss most on the years I spend Christmas with the in-laws. Enjoy some of yours for me...

[laura 11d]

mc - you must be a paisan. We do the fish mariana sauce also - tuna and olives. My grandfather was first generation and he really did it up. After he died, the second generation stopped doing it all. Now the grandchildren have taken it up as a mission to see if we can make 12 different kinds of fish appetizers. Salmon spread. Crab cake. Tapenade. Lobster tail. Shrimp cocktail. ... We like a challenge.

[Z*lda]

I like the annual Christmas card family newsletters, too. I think it's interesting how you've distinguished between the "Once a Year" and the "Every Day" friends. I never thought of it that way before.

It's empowering to know there are people out in the world that I'm connected to, even though I rarely see them in person as the years pass....

[Tom]

I decided to finally start sending cards the Christmas after my son was born. Handmade, of course, just like the ones my mother does every year. As a result of this purism, I didn't send any cards for three years, despite having mentally designed really excellent ones.

This year, I finally bought a bunch of museum greeting cards with Romare Bearden watercolors and am sending a bunch of them, many to addresses googled with a great deal of difficulty.

In fact, I am going to run out of the nice Bearden cards before I get to all of my every day friends.