Cards are season's best gifts

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

I will miss the cards the most.

Not the music, though I have loved having the radio on all day, one Christmas song after another. But there will be hymns, still, at all the churches all the way through Epiphany.

Not the Christmas lights, either, because they will continue to brighten the world for at least another week, and even longer where the 12 days of Christmas are observed.

And not all the goodwill toward men because though it's abundant at Christmas, it surrounds us every day. It's just not dressed up as Santa and given a face in the papers and a voice on the nightly news.

Cookies? Drinks? The doorbell ringing. Gifts and visits from family and friends?

Pick a holiday. Valentine's Day, Easter, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving. We celebrate constantly in our culture - birthdays, promotions, homecomings, First Communions, graduations, making it through another week - getting together and eating and drinking are things we regularly do.

We cook. We laugh. We talk. We have mini-Christmases all year long.

But we don't send greeting cards to everyone we know except once a year. We don't write nice notes or long, personal letters or take photos of our family, except at Christmastime.

It's my favorite tradition.

I like buying Christmas cards, choosing the ones that are exactly right for this year. I like writing notes on the cards and enclosing pictures and thinking of the person I'm writing to. I don't even mind waiting in line at the post office to choose the right stamp.

But what I like best are December afternoons when the mail comes, hearing the squeak of the truck's brakes, the creak of the mailbox, then looking out and seeing the mailbox stuffed not with fliers and bills, but with cards and letters.

I look at the writing on the envelopes - you don't see writing much anymore - and I can tell even before I glance at the return address who the sender is.

I don't open my Christmas cards on the run. I wait until I can give them the attention they deserve. So if I'm in the middle of something, I put the cards aside. Then later, sometimes hours later, I make tea and sit and drink it while I read the cards and it's like a little visit with each person. When I'm finished, I put everything in a big Christmas bowl, which sits on the kitchen counter. And when my husband comes home, he sits and reads the cards and letters, too.

I don't know why we don't all write to each other more often. But of course I know. We can call. We can e-mail. We can communicate in more efficient ways.

But we don't because calling takes time and e-mail requires a response.

A card once a year we can manage. It's a wave, a smile, a friendly hello. It's quiet. It's not a lengthy conversation.

But it can mean as much.

Every year, the girl who used to be my children's baby sitter sends a photo card of her children. "Love, Frank, Jean, Anthony, and Sarah" the card always says.

But the picture changes; Anthony and Sarah have grown from babies to little kids to beautiful teenagers.

I love this. I love being included in a little way in their lives. I love opening a card postmarked Colorado and seeing how my friend Biggy's kids have changed, how his dog has grown, how life is turning out for him. It's just a glance, but it's enough to make me happy.

I love family Christmas letters where you learn what everyone is doing, and I even love the cards that arrive with only a stamped "Season's Greetings," because they're a hello, too, an "I was thinking of you."

What I don't love is how it suddenly ends. How the day after Christmas, the mailbox holds only a few stray cards and the next day there are only fliers and bills again.

I'll hear the mail truck squeaking its way up the street this week, but I won't come running again until next year. I hope e-cards never replace real cards because the real cards are the unheralded gifts of the season, hellos from the past that we can see and touch and hold.