Christmas Cards

My daughter wrote this morning about Christmas cards and funny ones she and MJC might send to people. One of the networks told a story about two guys who have exchanged the same card for more than 60 years but have no other contact during the year. Both of those things got me to think about the whole convention of Christmas cards.

One of the first years we were married I was working for a Vermont senator. We thought it was appropriate to send out Christmas cards (we don't do that as much today - there is nothing more silly than the card which goes out unsigned - real sentiment - or the long Christmas letter to people you hardly know). But we went to the place in DC where you could buy cards and found that to get one with a picture and an engraved Christmas wishes with your names was frightfully expensive. (I am also not a fan of the general holiday wishes - PC baloney in extreme). We had about 50 that we wanted to send - and the minimum was 100 to get a reasonable price.

I had a friend in the office who was single. We were talking at lunch one day in November and he said, "I really want to send out Christmas cards but I only have about 50 people I want to send them to and they are too expensive to do that for just 50." We came upon a solution. The next Saturday we went down to the Capitol, stood on the East Steps (where Presidents are inaugurated) and took a picture of the three of us. We then went to the card shop and had 100 cards sent out that said something like "Merry Christmas from drtaxsacto and quonxa and the name of the guy in the office" (in truth I was not using the moniker then and he is now a distinguished professor of law and economics at a university in Chicago which is not the University of Chicago but a good place none-the-less. (You get the idea.)

In the responses both of us got from the card - our non-mutual friends expressed confusion at who the other person was in the picture? It brought us both gales of glee.