In 20th century America, sending and receiving Christmas cards was a time-honored ritual to show regard to family and friends. Long distance calls and exchanging letters took time and money, but it took only a few minutes to write a line or two on Christmas card and slap on a stamp that cost next to nothing. Sending cards to old friends also increased the odds that you would hear back with news of deaths, marriages, births, graduations, other life changing events, and heart-warming sentiments. Within a few decades of our marriage, Jo and I had acquired or inherited a Christmas card list of close to 100 (or maybe more) people/families. To ease the burden, Jo printed names and addresses on mailing labels, and we had stickers for our return address. We divided up the list between us, and worked together to get them out before Christmas, but sometimes didn’t make it. Of course, quite a few friends in the U.S. and overseas didn’t celebrate Christmas, so we just made our greetings inclusive of Hannukah, New Year, and every other holiday. I suppose most people were just happy to hear from us at least once a year.
In 2012, we were in Malaysia for a sabbatical and decided to just send out an “electronic” holiday letter to everyone rather than our handwritten notes on cards. To compensate for the lack of a personal touch, I wrote longish letter with more details of our adventures, family life, travel, and a bit of philosophical and/or political musings. It was also easy to add a family picture and links to photo albums. Here is the list of my holiday letters for each year, updated with working links to the Google photo albums. Unfortunately, the picture captions have been lost with changes in Google photo platform
Charlie
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
I discovered that Jo also wrote holiday letters even earlier– some of these may have been early drafts.