Washington - If you haven’t already completed your gift shopping and mailed all of your festive season cards, you may as well forget about it for this year. You’re too late.
But on the bright side: There are 390 days till next Christmas.
Speaking of Christmas, there’s a chance you’ve been doing your Christmas cards all wrong – at least in the unforgiving eyes of My Lovely Wife.
Every December I dread showing her the mail, lest a holiday card anger her in some way and necessitate reaching for the thorazine tranquilliser gun I keep on the mantel. When it comes to Christmas cards, Ruth has very strong notions. Please keep these in mind:
* Do not send out a card that is a photo of just your child/children. We know that your kids are cute and that you’re proud of them, but they’re not our friends. You are.
* Don’t skimp on the information. There was a time when it was considered rude and impersonal to send the same photocopied holiday letter to everyone on your list. But whatever stigma was once attached to that practice has since evaporated.
That’s because everything is impersonal now. We keep up with our friends and relatives by sharing information on the web.
You may not have composed a first-person essay since high school. Too bad. Start writing.
* Give us some sense of what’s happened in your life over the last 12 months: relationships, jobs, holidays, human births, human deaths, pet acquisitions, pet deaths, disappointment in/approval of the political system, epiphanies, arrests, incarcerations, medical procedures, furniture rearrangement, plastic surgery, lottery winnings, alien visitations, etc.
We know these things are ripe for ridicule. We don’t care. We want more than just proof of life. Don’t be like the couple we’ve known for more than 30 years who send us the same Christmas card every December: on the front a drawing of a snowy rural scene; inked inside, nothing but their two signatures.
Perhaps they are being held hostage. We have no way of knowing. – Washington Post