Christmas Cards
You would hear the stories of why we kept each Christmas card, of who each person was to you, or what it meant to receive a card from a far away family member. Back in the days of snail mail each part of the holiday was a chance to hear stories that traveled back in time and across cultures. In New Jersey, Queens, in midtown Manhattan, in Seattle and Chicago, to name just a few places, this scene was being played out by many dozens of us whose family members had migrated to the United States.
To see more historic Christmas cards visit http://www.mgz.hr/hr/bozicne-cestitke/
These were the days before cell phones, much less smart ones, but they were also days that had full-time electricity, color televisions and big refrigerators which were new and affordable in a way they weren’t back in the villages of that time. Each Christmas card or decoration was valued by my mother like a treasure of some kind and although she transferred that feeling to us children it was still hard to understand why or how these cards were so deeply important. To me growing up I barely understood how precious things like paper notebooks, marmalade or fresh oranges could be in the dead of winter. We might not have been rich, but we had supermarkets where all these things were available.
I live a regular modern life now and my organizational skills are kind of poor. I can barely keep up with all the work, projects and other things in my life, so all that is to say: I haven’t sent cards out in years. I know a card stands out when I receive one, because most other people even with better organization than me forget or get busy, or stop sending them once their children are grown. I never mind not receiving them, because of how I live without sending them -- but I do like to remember those days when the house would be full of the newly arrived cards. I like remembering the names, the excitement when we heard the sound of the mailbox opening and cards being delivered.
I can recall my brother and I checking out the stamps people used at the kitchen table, and the way the cards from across the ocean were lighter weight, because international shipping was too expensive with heavy cards. I can still see the clean and elegant lines of the cursive scripts put down in heavy blue and black pens. I remember too that most of the cards were religious and many of them showed the whole Holy Family, not just the Baby King. Things were simple and relatable and inside the wishes were about peace and health, those humble sentiments that really are worth more than gold. That was Christmas then, split between cultures and countries, generations and languages that offered “Happy Tidings!” Cestitima! And “Auguri!” but always united by a sense of the sacred, the holiness of the season.
Those days appear to be gone, replaced by “Happy Holidays” secularism and shopping marathons meant to get our loved ones “what they really want.” Reality is, all we ever want is to feel the warmth of love and the spirit of closeness in everything and everyone surrounding us. This sense of closeness doesn’t come from the small things alone, but that spirit sure does seem to thrive less in the big gifts, fancy cars wrapped with bows or black Friday deals that got us feeling accomplished. The spirit of love can and often does live in the smallest note, those few marks of a pen, or even an e-card or a phone call, definitely in a homemade cookie or two. Despite the cards we are offered, I still notice those values and those treasured intentions coming from so many of my well-organized relatives. I guess we learned something in between commercial breaks and our uptake of the modern ways. They learned to do it, and I learned to write about it. Together we keep moving forward.
When those Christmas cards arrived they were a chance to make names on a page come alive, so we would know those names written in love were important, so we wouldn’t forget them or some part of ourselves. As young children we lived for the stories of our elders and with each card we sort of learned to wait for the story. Sometimes our favorite show came on and we found ourselves torn between listening and keeping up with the programs we had been following for weeks. We slowly grew and learned to start repeating the family stories ourselves to younger relatives, “This is from your cousin, and they live in Australia…” We learned that television was never more important than real life.
“Remembering those names, hearing those stories of far away relatives made the house come alive with a village life we would never live ourselves.”
That storytelling repeated by mothers and fathers all over the diaspora still maintain a collective memory and fill our houses with friendly ghosts, with tiny tidbits of where their house sat in relation to the town well or the church, or what their grandfather did for a living or how their brother who was kind but never came home from some war or a ship used to sing at the top of his voice like an angel. That storytelling built memories for us and for all the other kids living like us, and it made us rich in a way we never suspected until we became adults. Those cards made us rich with connection, with the kind of treasures that can never be made of the things, but the thoughts that came with them. Those kind of gifts stay with us a lifetime, and they can’t be bought and they sure can’t be sold.
