Writing « Walnuts on My Windshield

A new item must be scheduled into my day: letter-writing.

I have a friend in prison, and my goal is to write him once a week. I usually do that on Sunday afternoon, along with taking a nap and finishing the adult laundry.

I also have a daughter in college, who likes to get snail mail from home. My goal is to write her twice a week.

In a couple of days, I will also have two children who will be away from home for five weeks on a mission trip. My guess is that they will like to receive mail, as well, so I plan to write each of them at least once a week.

Now, the daughter in college can read my blog, so it is a bit challenging to think of things to write to her that she hasn’t already read. The two mission trippers will not have internet access, so I can recycle blogged news into letters for them. The same is true for the prisoner, but I have decided that I would be able to keep up with the writing better if I had a set time of day to do it.

Initially I plan to try 12:00 noon. I should be able to crank out a decent letter in 30 minutes, shouldn’t I? And if so, I could still eat lunch at 12:30 when the kids do. Well, with the planning done, now all I need to do is follow through.

Christmas cards are a big deal to me. I enjoy sending them and receiving them, and since we send a lot of them, I usually shop for Christmas cards on deep discount in January. I didn’t do that this year, and when October rolled around and I started looking in catalogs and online, I couldn’t find anything I really liked. I like to really like the Christmas cards I send.

In the past, when I haven’t been able to find just the right card, I have ended up at CPO, a Christian bookstore in Springfield. There, I have to pay a bit more, but I can always find something nice. So I went to CPO this week, and I was very disappointed. I couldn’t find anything with a good, meaningful message. Not even among the really expensive cards that I would never consider buying.

I came home and thought and thought and thought. Finally I thought a new though: I could make my own cards, and then they would say EXACTLY what I want them to say. Thursday night I lay in bed, unable to sleep, working out different wordings for Christmas cards. I finally hit on a sentence I liked, so I hopped out of bed and went in the bathroom to write it down.

The next morning, I got on the computer at 11:00 AM and spent almost my whole Off Day working on The Card. There were ongoing fights with Publisher, searches for non-copyrighted clip art, new printer challenges, and a veto on wording by 33.33% of the family, but FINALLY, I had The Card looking the way I wanted it to look. We even had almost enough cardstock to print them all. Now I just need one more pack of card stock and a bunch of envelopes.

As far as lowering my standards, I finally decided NOT to sign all the cards by hand. We are talking almost 200 cards, and with my carpal tunnel syndrome and time limitations, writing something like “Merry Christmas with love, Scott, Patty, Katie, Jessica, Josiah and Andrew” 200 times is a chore that I don’t relish. So this year, I had the computer sign all the cards. That’s right. If you are on our family mailing list, you will be receiving a lovely, meaningful card that is NOT signed by hand. It will also have a mailing label on the envelope and a wonderful newsy newsletter within, but it will not be personalized.

My mother taught me that cards should be signed by hand, and ideally contain a nice, hand-written note. She is right, of course, but I have decided that it’s a higher priority to me for more of our friends to receive card and letter with news of our family than for fewer of our friends to receive a card (and letter) that is signed by hand. So, yes, 2007 marks the year that I have become slovenly in the hand-signing-of-Christmas-cards department, but it doesn’t mean I don’t know better or don’t care. It just means there are a lot of things I’d rather do with my limited card-signing time and energy. Like blog. = )