North Star Writers Group

Fewer and fewer greeting cards find their way to my home every year. A decade ago, my partner and I used to string garland around the living room and hang dozens and dozens of Christmas cards on it for a very festive seasonal look.

These days we are doing well to get 15 holiday cards. Perhaps this is because fewer people are inclined to correspond with us. It takes time and effort, after all, to prepare a physical card for mailing. In the digital age, we might expect hardcopy cards to go electronic, yet we don’t receive more than two or three e-cards at this time of year. And the cards, both hardcopy and electronic, that do show up arrive later and later in the month.

What’s going on here? After all, this is the great age of digital connectivity. We’re always available, thanks to high-speed Internet access, cell phones, PDAs and laptop computers. We have instant messaging (e-mail is for old fogeys), virtual Web communities, news and music sent straight to our handheld devices anywhere, anytime.

That’s precisely the problem. The more “connected” we become, the more isolated we remain. Always available, we no longer have the luxury of time. Time for ourselves. Time to relax. Time to reflect on the year gone by. Time to jot down our thoughts and experiences and send them to our loved ones and friends. With our focus split in so many directions at once, we no longer have the ability or energy to pay real attention to any one thing or any one person. Multitasking is highly overrated.

This dreary time shortage and attention deficit shows in the declining number of greeting cards, and in the shorter and shorter messages that most convey. In some instances, shorter is definitely better. There are always those holiday letters full of not-very-well-disguised bragging.

Happily, my remaining annual correspondents spare me this type of self-aggrandizing. Instead, they recall the small things they did during the year – what their children, now grown, are up to, their vacations and misadventures and their increasing roster of aches and pains as we all grow older.

The mother of my closest childhood friend writes that her husband, now in his 80s, is still doing projects around the house and that his home-improvement skills have saved them a great deal of money over the years. “No, you can’t have him,” she hastens to add.

A colleague from my days at daily newspapers reports that her eldest child has had very serious heart problems during the summer. A third friend tells me that her college-age daughter has parted ways with her boyfriend but that her parents still don’t know if another is on the horizon.

Yet another colleague from my journalism era, referring to my plea for tumor humor after my surgery earlier this year, writes, “…if I even hear a tumor humor rumor, I’ll pass it along.” Oh boo hiss, but this is very typical of the type of silly jokes we exchanged with one another during our time together on the copy desk of the Las Vegas Sun.

These small events are very much the topics we would talk about were we able to sit down together for a cup of coffee and a chat. Most of my friends, however, do not live close at hand, so frequent visits are not possible. Some dwell in other countries, like England and Canada. Others live thousands of miles away in other parts of the country. Since distance prevents me from being a part of their daily lives, I relish these little details in their holiday letters. They provide a small window of intimacy and keep us in tune emotionally.

That emotional connection - the intimacy and the attention it requires - is really what makes holiday greeting cards so special. The cards themselves are merely the means to an end, giving us a way to reaffirm our sense of community through the priceless gift of sharing ourselves and our lives with loved ones.

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This is Column #CT15. Request permission to publish here.