Christmas cards

It occurs to me that I don't _have_ to write about knitting -- and anyway I didn't get much done yesterday. Christmas interferes badly with life.

As sure as we'll sit down to turkey and Brussels sprouts on the 25th, some journalist between now and then will fill up a few column inches making fun of the summary-of-the-year sheets which some people include with their cards. What I want to say is, I love them. The ones I don't like are the cards from old friends whom we haven't seen for years, who just say Happy Christmas Love Jeanetta (or whatever) without even a half-sentence of news.

When we were young we used occasionally to keep track of who sent us cards, with the thought of excluding from our own list anyone who didn't reciprocate. I decided that was mean, and we abandoned the practice. This year, I'm going to resurrect it, not for the sake of weeding out the Scrooges, but just to see who's still alive. Not sending us a card doesn't prove that anyone's dead, my husband rightly points out. But sending a card definately shows that they were alive in mid-December.

I think there were times, when our children were younger, when some people's year-end summaries did make me feel that our children weren't quite pulling their weight at school or, later, at improving the world. But now that they are all middle-aged and I am secure in the knowledge that there are no four people in the world I would rather be the mother of, other people's stories are enthralling, and arouse no angst.

I'm well up on my own card-writing (hence limited knitting) and not too bad on present-buying. Wrapping and trudging up the hill to the post office to dispatch packages to Thessaloniki, Beijing, and Connecticut is where I am badly behind. Beijing will be lucky to see anything before February.