Although I have complicated feelings about the holiday season, I still embrace certain traditions of the Christmas I grew up with. One is the Christmas tree, which, though we usually don’t get around to buying one, is one of my favorite traditions of the season. I adore the origami-ish process of wrapping presents (though I loathe shopping for them and am not too fussed one way or another about receiving them). But my favorite by far is sending holiday cards, a tradition that has gradually fallen out of favor. And that’s a shame, because these little missives are potentially much more than a way to improve Hallmark’s bottom line: they’re a way to convey the human touch during a season that’s all too often lacking in that kind of thing.

There's a slow grace to communicating by mail that appeals to me. Oddly, for a person born when the Moon was in Gemini, I dislike the telephone. Well, that’s not exactly true -- I do dislike answering the phone or placing a phone call, but once I’m engaged in a conversation with someone I like, I can yammer away for a pretty long time. Yet the telephone has an immediacy that is a bit of an imposition. If you call for a nice chat at the precise moment that I’m lashing out in an existential premenstrual fury, it can be an awkward moment for both of us. Owing to unfortunate timing, I can’t be the gentle friend you hoped you’d find and that I desperately want to be -- I’m too involved in my own little shrewish drama. Alternately, when I pick up the phone to call you, I worry that I’m interrupting your only free afternoon in a month, or at the exact moment when you would rather/need to be doing about fifty other things from your ever-burgeoning To Do list, and that you’re just too nice to tell me to shove off. Between the timing thing and the lack of opportunity to formulate soulful insights or snappy responses, the phone is kind of brutal, the freeway approach to communication: direct and expedient, but the likelihood of a sort of telecommunicative multi-car pileup gives one pause.

So from girlhood I was an inveterate letter writer, a child with pen pals in exotic lands, a teenager who could spend hours nosing around a stationery store, whose hands and clothes were covered in ink from leaky ballpoint pens. I waited for letters the way an addict waits for her dealer; I detested holidays because there was no mail delivery. And so it went for years -- encyclopedic, soul-baring letters scrawled in longhand on wacky stationery or yellow legal pads. But inevitably technology intervened: I got a computer. And since I type so much faster than I write, and the ability to easily edit my thoughts is irresistible… these days, even on those rare occasions I send "snail mail," it’s usually typed.

Around the time I was embracing the joys of typography, letter writing finally died a quiet death and people stopped writing back altogether; there followed a couple of bleak years when I had to resort to the telephone or face social destitution. Fortunately, in recent years I’ve given myself over completely to the lure of the Internet, and email has more or else saved my (social) life. Mail can sit there until I’m in a mellow and receptive phase, until I’m sitting with a cup of tea and can offer up my heart in a few well-considered phrases. Email has completely replaced the phone as my day-to-day social conduit. But unfortunately, it’s replaced most of my old-fashioned, pen-to-paper correspondence as well. So holiday cards offer one of my few remaining opportunities to engage in a good, old-fashioned, USPS-sanctioned, total-immersion postal ritual. It goes like this:

I buy my cards in January, when I can get really nice quality ones at a decent price; I bring them home, stuff them in a drawer and fish them out after Thanksgiving the next year. (Unless I've forgotten I ever bought them, in which case I go out and buy some horribly expensive ones, then get them home and remember the ones I already bought, and stamp my feet and say bad words.) Then, I go the whole nine: build a fire, put Christmas music on the CD player, light candles. And I sit down with my favorite pen and address envelopes, inscribe little notes, affix stamps, sometimes even drag out my box of rubber stamps and decorate the envelopes a little. The next day I bundle them all up and take them to the post office, and they're on their way: Little hand-hewn pieces of communication, tangible expressions of seasonal cheer for relatives and friends who are too far away for a hug.

The Sun moving through Sagittarius during this bright and sacred season issues the short-term evolutionary imperative to stretch our hearts, expand our horizons and travel to other lands – even if the only travel we can afford is a little piece of our handwriting sent to a loved one far away. During this Full Moon season of Gemini, the sign of Communication, why not send forth seasonal cards and letters as messengers to convey all that our expanded hearts contain - flying along on Mercury’s wings to touch the ones we love, the ones we don’t call often enough, and the ones whose email languishes in our inbox.

© 2005 April Elliott Kent
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