Remember
when everyone used to send real Christmas cards by mail? We did as well early
on – with notes in many of them to special people. Some had longer letters
enclosed. In return, we received many cards from friends and relatives, again
many with letters telling us what experiences those families had during the
previous year. Many of those letters are now part of our family history, like
pages from a diary.
In
more recent years the world has turned to electronic delivery of holiday
greetings. This past Christmas, that is all we sent out, although we did get a
few real ones back. We apologized for just sending out cards via email although
most people did like them. The music (White Christmas) certainly added
to well-wishes.
I
inherited a small collection of cards that had been sent to and from my
grandparents. They include birthday cards, Mother’s and Father’s Day cards and
Christmas cards. There are not a lot of them, but they are special. I have them
in a small three-ring binder. It’s neat to see the messages people wrote in them.
I wrote a blog post about one of them on 24 May 2016 – a get-well card sent to
my grandfather in 1955.
Among
the collection are a few Christmas cards addressed to my grandparents by my
mother.
When
I was growing up, we received enough cards to string along the entire length of
the living room wall or arrange them in a seasonal display.
I
think I have every card, for every occasion, we ever sent to each other:
Christmas, birthdays, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, special occasions. They are
all in a storage bin marked Cards (What else?). It will probably be a miracle
if they survive past us as our children either do not have the room to store
things or don’t like to keep a lot of stuff themselves. We hope they might take
the opportunity after we are gone to go through them and select out a few
personal mementoes. It may also be a way of bringing family history to life
with our grandchildren if they have a chance to look at the old cards and
letters.
Some
of them are cute!
Some
are funny, if maybe a bit irreverent!
Some
are sappy!
Some
are especially sentimental, having been sent to or from our parents, children
or grandchildren.
Many of our cards ended up in our family albums. Most ended up in the storage bin as
room in albums was left for actual photos. Speaking of the bin, I found a
letter and some photos from 1983 while going through it today – items that
should probably have been put into an album.
I
have said here before that nothing gets thrown away in our house if it has
anything to do with family history. The cards are included in the memorabilia I
keep around.
As
may be seen here, it can be fun to see what was part of Christmas Past.
