By Lana Schwartz
Each year, as a chill takes hold in the air and Thanksgiving recedes firmly into the rearview mirror, I am overtaken by the impulse to partake in the most festive thing I’ll do all year: Open my laptop and pull up an Excel spreadsheet.
Within this spreadsheet lives (extremely Miranda Priestly voice) the list. The names and addresses of friends, family members, and former colleagues to whom each year — now for the last six years or so — I send a physical, handwritten holiday card. These are not the glossy, professional headshot-bearing kind of holiday cards, showcasing a nuclear family in matching flannel pajamas. Any card from me, a Jewish unmarried millennial woman, is more likely to bear a nondenominational greeting like “Gnome for the Holidays” than a marker of perceived domestic bliss.
The custom started off small: Upon receiving a card or two in 2017, I endeavored to return the favor. Finding that I liked the feeling of sending well-wishes, I returned to the practice the year after, and the year after that.
Then, the world changed. And so did my own world, and that of my friends and family.
My mom passed away from cancer on December 31, 2018. A short year or so later, the world was ravaged by Covid. Friends who once lived around the corner were now strewn across the country, having returned to their hometowns or using this upheaval as the chance to make a big life change, like a move to Los Angeles or New Mexico. I saw the ones who remained nearby sparingly. The loss I’d only begun to recover from felt magnified in the harshest days of the pandemic, with little-to-no routine or in-person companionship to buoy me or fill this impossible, gaping void. The holidays, even under the most normal of circumstances, are already hard on those with one chair at the table missing. Factor in the empty, blank haze of quarantine and the fact that in the years prior I’d spent my holidays mocked by the Christmas decorations in my mom’s hospice ward, it was like a triple decker made entirely of grief.
Yet the winter of 2020 is when my predilection for sending holiday cards blossomed into something bigger. Sitting on my couch, with Christmas movies in the background for vague holiday ambiance, I’d write out a few cards a night, wishing my loved ones a better year than the one past. It gave me something to return to, something tactile, something that was real and corporal and captured my attention away from evenings increasingly spent online, doomscrolling and feeling nihilistic and liminal. Each night I had as many holiday cards as I could write until my hand cramped, and so I would, too, the next night, and every night for the foreseeable future, and that was enough to carry me as the last days of the year eked into the next.
In the years since I began, my outgoing recipients list has ballooned. With each passing year, more and more friends have moved away, started new careers, gotten engaged, gotten married, had children. It’s become harder, as it always does, with time and distance, to stay in touch. But these annual cards give me the perfect excuse to say, Hello, I’m thinking of you. Sometimes I get a card back, but more often it’s a text or message letting me know they’ve received my card. It gives us a chance to catch up and connect, and in some cases, it’s maybe the only time we’ll do so all year. But it keeps the ties that bind us together more taut than tenuous.
I’ve had friends tell me that my cards have become a highlight of their holiday season. For me, it’s become the assurance that I’m proactively taking a step to make this time a little more joyous, and my mailbox (physical or otherwise) a little fuller. Given that my own holidays have become so grief-laden, it would be easy for me to wallow, to demand that anyone who wants to speak to me be the one to take the initiative. Yet you have to give to receive.
We may have emerged from the quarantined days of the pandemic, but those of us who had the privilege to do so did it a little lonelier, a little more isolated, and a little less connected than we once were. Loneliness was already on the rise in America, and we’re still untangling what effects of how we live today have on each of us — not to mention the way loneliness can help pave the way to totalitarianism, seen in the results of the 2024 election. If there’s one buzzword that’s emerged in the days since, it’s been “community.” How do we foster it, and how do we keep it? In my experience, seemingly simple actions have yielded the most returns.
In November of 2023, I suffered another loss. My closest family friend, Nora, with whom I spent over three decades of Christmases, also passed away from cancer. And having these cards to send and these friends to connect with proved to be a much-needed respite. Despite everything, I once again delighted in searching for holiday cards that do their best to be festive but unreligious (still a surprisingly Herculean task), and settled on a set from my local card shop depicting some very happy polar bears and penguins enjoying their snowy surroundings. Some years, depending on my budget, I splurge on a few sets of particularly fancy cards with hand-drawn illustrations, and other years, I rummage through the bargain bin of last year’s discards. (For this winter, by the way, I already have at least one box of cards with festive socks drawn on them, announcing “Warm Wishes.”)
I understand why many believe holiday cards are for those who have established themselves in some sort of domestic fashion — and to be clear, I want to see pictures of your babies and dogs and third-trimester bellies serving as pregnancy announcements — but I don’t think holiday cards strictly need to be some kind of advertisement for your life. Sometimes, they can be exactly what they are: Three gnomes wearing beanies, with a message scrawled inside.