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Today in My History 2000: Does
Santa Wear Leather?
Theater Reviews
My family Cast (updated 7/16)
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STOCKINGS December 10, 2020 Well, damn. I made a nice package of cookies for the mailman and Ned saw someone steal the package and take off on her bicycle. So no cookies for the mailman after all. The spirit of the season. :(
When Jeri was 2 or 3, I knitted her a Christmas stocking (I could knit in those days!), which meant that as each of her brothers approached their first Christmases, I had to knit a stocking for each of them. I am proud of the work I did on each of those stockings. They are big stockings. Long stockings. Stockings that take a lot to fill up! When I was a kid, we didn't have Christmas stockings, we hung up our own socks and "Santa" filled them with walnuts and oranges (not sure how we got oranges in our socks, but we did). There was never anything called a "stocking stuffer." But my word can you spend a lot trying to fill up one of these stockings that I knitted. And five of them? I can't even remember what I put in them over the years, but I know that I spent a lot buying stocking stuffers, over and above the "real" Christmas gifts. I've spent the last two days getting my Christmas letter e-mailed to people. Every year I wonder how tacky it is to make a web site as a Christmas letter and e-mail the link to people. But it's who I am. I am a keyboard person. I am a web designer and I love being able to make a page that describes our year and shows pictures of the whole family. When I started doing Christmas letters, they were just typed and copied. Then I started adding photos and in order to get the quality good, I took them to a printer for many years. That was a big expense, but I was happy with how they turned out. When postage started going up so much -- I sent about 100 cards/letters a year -- it just got tooo expensive to buy cards, pay a printer, and buy 100 stamps, but I did want to reach out to friends, so I designed the first on-line letter in 2000, and I have now been doing it for twenty years. The thing I like about what I do now is that I send out individual notes to people or groups of people so that I can include a personal message, not just a link to the letter. It's like writing a note on the Christmas card, only generally longer since I'm typing it. This year I designed a mini Christmas letter that could be printed to send to the few people I know who do not use the internet (or whose e-mail address I do not have)/ It's not as nice as the web page, but gets the information out there. I don't know how many people get my emails and think it's all very tacky, but I do get some really nice messages back from some folks, which encourages me to continue doing what I'm doing. I got a wonderful message from my "Brasilian brother" today.
There are some people I don't hear from and am sad about it every year. My good friend with whom I worked for many years hasn't contacted me in years and I don't know why. She's another person who just ghosted me (cutting off communication without any explanation). But I include her in my annual Christmas letter anyway, hoping she is interested in learning how things are. The saddest responses I get each year are like the one I got last year, from the husband of one of my best high school friends, who told me she had died that year. I don't like getting those responses...and the older we get, the more of them I expect to get. The nicest thing about these annual
Christmas letters is that it makes a wonderful history of our family. I
spent this afternoon reading through them from 2000 to the present. So
much I'd forgotten that is all recorded in the Christmas letter. |
PHOTO OF THE DAY
Ned bought lights for the tree in our front yard |
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This is entry #7563