When I was growing up, twice-a-day mail delivery started the first of December. By the time we got home from school each day, the silver bowl on the table by the front door was filled with Christmas cards. My sister Jeanne and I inspected each one and then began our ritual of affixing them to the rungs of the banister with see-through tape and red ribbon.
Through the cards, we got to know bits and pieces of my parents’ past, those mysterious and glamorous years before they were married and had a house full of kids.
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Like Christmas clockwork, Mother received an annual greeting from a dear high school friend, Imelda, who had married another classmate, Charlie Wicks. Charlie was one of the first teenagers in Thornwood, New York, to have his own Model T. According to my mother, he loved that car almost as much as he loved Imelda. His passion apparently lasted a lifetime, as the illustration on the Wicks’ greeting usually featured an automobile.
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“Love, Imelda and Charlie,” the inscription always said, with a brief note about how things were going and a promise that they would get together in the new year.
Other once-a-year friends and relatives checked in at our 31 Oak Avenue address, and it would not seem like Christmastime until the mailman brought their season’s greetings. Aunt Renie and her dog Pal never failed to remember us. And my mother’s brother, Sydney, could be counted on for a card and a newsy letter. In painstaking detail, he chronicled each child’s triumphs and his own career conquests. Sometimes Jeanne and I wondered if we were really related, as the Kellys from Ohio seemed as perfect as the Cleavers, nothing like our own imperfect family.
The few greetings from Canada, my father’s native land, seemed exotic. Daddy seldom talked about his family, but occasionally a Christmas missive from up north sparked reminiscence of blizzards from his childhood. Reportedly, the drifts were so high that he and his siblings had to leave the house through an upstairs window, and then snowshoe to school at St. Malachy’s in sub-zero temperatures.
My father’s job in the newspaper business meant we received yule tidings from various VIP’s. The district judge’s card, replete with a photo of his family, was inevitably nested in a gold-lined envelope. Our congressman, an old drinking buddy of Daddy’s, never signed the cards himself. My father suspected that Eddie would have managed only a crude X. Ann, his long-suffering wife, never failed to write an update on their only child, a red-haired colleen who took a vow of poverty and entered a cloistered convent at 18.
No Christmas was complete without hearing from the Keeney’s, my mother’s second cousins. Their gaggle of runny-nosed kids was an ongoing embarrassment to Mom. She never got over the shame that Benny, one of the Keeney clan, appeared on the tv show “What’s My Line,” revealing to the whole world that he operated the machine at Coney Island boardwalk that blew women’s skirts over their heads.
As my parents aged, the number of cards dwindled. After my father died, there were fewer still. Over time, once-bold signatures evolved into shaky script. Tales of family trips and overseas adventures gave way to accounts of illness, transitions to assisted living or a final move to a single room in a child’s home.
Imelda and Charlie Wicks became just Imelda, and finally the cards stopped all together.
Since then, of course, times have changed, but I still trek to the mailbox each afternoon, excited at the prospect of hearing from my own old friends. Though most of the greetings are transmitted via email, those delivered by hand are still the best. Time toddles on; the notes are getting shorter, the kids older. We have transitioned from graduations and weddings to divorce and remarriage. Now there are grandchildren, life partners and retirement parties, with occasional accounts of illness and losses incurred.
Admittedly, my own card sending has evolved, and the number of cards received is a down to a mere trickle. But I still think fondly of the flurry of greetings that used to accompany the Christmas season. I remember the old names, the distinctive handwriting, the way my sister and I used the cards to deck the entry hall.
Every time the front door opened, the cards fluttered and shifted gently, as if the ghosts of Christmases past and present had just whisked by.
This column is republished from the Northern Kentucky Tribune. Read the original.
