Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE
Same approach as for Like for Doors 7 (Gifts), and 13 (Holiday Shopping): one page per task.
Task 1: Do you still send holiday cards? Do you go for amusing, inspirational, or make your own?
I used to love sending holiday cards and spent a lot of time selecting the right kind of motif for each recipient while I still had the time to do so, when I had a huge number of penfriends all around the world … and before I was introduced to the custom of “office holiday cards”, or rather, the fact that the recipient will put all the cards received standing half-opened on a shelf near their desk, in plain view of any visitor to their office and with the cards from the most significant persons up front, as a sort of holiday extension of their “I love me” wall. That pretty much took the joy right out of it for me.
In recent years, while I was still working in larger firms, I’ve mostly contented myself with signing the office-ordained cards going to all the important business partners; though in individual cases I also sent (office) Christmas cards of my own. I did, however, also send a “Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays” email message to all the people who mattered most to me personally, and with whom I had genuinely enjoyed working over the course of that year; concluding those messages with some sort of holiday spirit-inducing image generated from my own photos, as part of my signature. Here are two examples — which you just may even remember because those two images I liked enough to end up them in the context of this community as well.
Christmas wishes in my private life have increasingly been either exchanged electronically or in person in recent years, too. I do still keep a diverse selection of Christmas cards in my office, because I still like the idea of sending them to people I really care for, and there’s a moment every single year when I decide that this year, I’m really going to get back to it. But usually, by the time that December rolls around, I’m just too drained and I simply can no longer muster the energy … so back to emails, blog posts and in-person wishes it is, after all. (Ditto for office purposes, for that matter.)
We send a few cards at Christmas to selected friends and relatives, though when I was working I always hated the pressure to write and give out cards to colleagues, noting that many of the ones I received had perfunctory, impersonal or generic messages (which seemed rather pointless) so I gave up on them.
As for Christmas letters (’round robins’ we call them here) the ones we receive — fewer and fewer each year I’m relieved to say — are often just cataloguing holidays or boasting about achievements by the senders or, more likely these days, their offspring. I hate these with a vengeance, and one year we sent off a spoof version of our own which I think may have marginally reduced the number we subsequently received (though I may be kidding myself).
Anyway, what’s social media for if not to keep one updated throughout the year and not just in one splurge at the end of the year?! I must admit I’m rather a Bah-Humbug kind of person where the season is concerned…