Merry Christmas, Lame-o

When I checked the mail today, I found a Christmas card that I had sent to my friend Laura Herberg in Scotland. When I sent the card, I remember thinking that there was no way it was going to get to Glasgow before Christmas, but I did think that it would get there.

Instead, the card went to Scotland and back, just like me. It was stamped by the goodly clerks at the Royal Mail on December 12, 2006. So it did get there in time--and then it turned around. When I opened the card and read what I had written almost six months ago I was grateful for the international u-turn. Here is the interior of the card, verbatim:

Hey Laura,

Somehow I decided to send Christmas cards this year (something I haven’t done in hella long). I hope your Christmas is festive and fun and you have a good time with your Mom. I’m sure you’ll come up with something to top last New Years. I’m going to stay w/ my family in a beach house (which I’m stoked about) for the holidays. I love getting your emails so keep ‘em coming!

[heart] Aud

Thank God I don’t have semi-annual reunions with all of the greeting cards I have written or the intervals between my holiday correspondences would truly be “hella long.”

I’m not sure what troubles me the most about this composition, which at first seems so benign, but I think it’s the phrase “festive and fun.” This is the type of thing that I would normally say out loud in a mocking tone, probably marked by an affected Midwestern accent. Those around me would understand that this is purely a vehicle for the expression of my deeply rooted cynicism towards virtually everything. Equally troubling is the truncated “’em” that has here been employed to help conjure the desired dialect, but on paper characterizes the typical lameness that I recognize in most of what I do.

Up until today, I have avoided greeting cards with prewritten messages inside and opted for “blank inside” on the grounds that I didn’t want to send a card with something stupid written inside. I must forthwith renounce that judgment. And it’s not as though the absence of the Comic Sans “Merry Christmas” printed in the center of the white page robs me of space needed to communicate and elaborate upon important information, because none was (not) delivered in the greeting above. Perhaps the check in the box by the word “incomplete” on the sticker applied by the postal workers does not refer to the address, but the content of the piece of mail.

The truth is that I approach writing cards with the same dreadful question that I approach the work-day: how am I ever going to fill this void? I answer this question with whatever comes to my mind first. The “I’m sure you’ll come up with something fun to top last New Years” is the postal equivalent to facing all the bills the same way in the register. It gets me from the beginning to the end.

I don’t know how the return of the prodigal Christmas card will affect the choices I make about future Christmas cards, probably not at all. I suppose I have to think of it like the opening of a time capsule. No matter how much time has passed since a photo’s capture or a letter’s composition, people will always think that they look younger and sound dumber than they are today. How else would they get from the beginning to the end?

I wonder if this card was in Scotland at the same time as me. Somewhere in a pile of mail, this small white envelope covered in blue crayon scribble and Crops of America stamps sat containing the remains of someone I was half a year ago. And then it followed me home.