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Yesterday, my e-mail included my first Christmas card of the season. Did it somehow awaken the spirit of Christmas in my life? Unfortunately, no. Did it cheer me to know that someone was thinking of me? Not really, because I doubt that a lot of thinking was behind the sending of the card. Did it even spur me to drag out my Christmas list and start addressing a few cards of my own? NO, NO, and NO.

Before you label me a hopeless Scrooge, (or Scroogette), please bear with me a moment.

According to my calendar, it is barely the middle of November. Thanksgiving and all the preparation for guests, and a joyful Thanksgiving season is yet ahead of us. And yet some eager beaver out there is trying to beat everyone else in the race to get their Christmas greetings out first.

Well, excuse me, but my Christmas spirit isn't that easily ignited.

In the first place, I hate e-mail cards for any occasion. You have to go to the effort of retrieving them in the first place, sometimes before you are even told who they are from, and they are often cold expressions that don't seem as though the sender even bothered to read the message before hitting the "send" button.

Secondly, I have always enjoyed using Christmas cards as part of my Christmas decor, so that I can occasionally glance through them reading and re-reading messages from close friends for the several weeks before Christmas. E-mail Christmas cards are a bit difficult to display.

Finally, an e-mail card tells me that I am not really very important to the sender of the card. This may be selfish, but at Christmas time, above all other times, I want to know that someone cares about me--not just that I am on their mailing list, and that they took a couple of minutes to hit a button to send the same message to 99 other "friends."

Guess what? Last year I got e-mail birthday cards from my insurance agent, from the local HomeTown Buffet, from a T-shirt company I once ordered a shirt from online, from my doctor, and from the Pepsi-Cola Company. (I'm still wondering how I got on Pepsi-Cola "Dear Friend" list.)

Anyway, you get the point. When I get a Christmas card from somebody, I want to know that it was actually from them to me--not just because I was part of some automated list.

As for the couple who sent me yesterday's e-mail Christmas card, I will probably give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they plan to be out of the country at Christmas time and want to make sure they don't forget an important friend like me. Or maybe, they have just received a notice from their doctor that they have only a few weeks to live. Naturally, they would want to tie up all the loose ends, one of which might be me, before it is too late.

I will probably address all my cards ahead of time on the printer, and then spend December 10-18 frantically writing long newsy letters to include in each of my cards--letters which may or may not ever be read, but at least I will feel great the day I deposit them in an old fashioned mailbox.

That feeling is proof, in my little world anyway, that Christmas is about more than marking names off a Christmas card list, or making sure I haven't forgotten anyone on my gift list. Christmas is about caring, really caring about the other people in my life.

P.S.
Jellen challenged me, on Associated Content, to write an article about the true meaning of Christmas. This isn't that article, but writing this blog entry has caused me to think more and more about the true meaning of Christmas. Maybe others on this site would like to join in and share during the next month or so about what Christmas really means to you.

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