Lori Falce: With every Christmas card I don't write

I am very sorry that you didn’t get a Christmas card from me.

Whether you are my closest family members or my best friends, coworkers or acquaintances, you didn’t go to the mailbox and get a thin slice of cardboard with smiling pictures of my son over the course of the year. There is no heartfelt wish for your celebrations and best intentions for the New Year. There is no upbeat letter telling you the highlights of our lives in 2021.

Please believe, this is a “not you, it’s me” situation.

Christmas cards are something I aspire to be organized enough to send every year. I am more likely to fly a reindeer to the grocery store.

In my closet, in a box tucked inside another box, there are three different years of cards that have little personal notes written to my grandma and my aunts and my cousins. Most of them are addressed. Some are even stamped. But somehow they never made it to the mailbox. I keep them as a form of penance — a way to shame myself into completing this task some year.

Sadly, I know that won’t work. After all, I kept the first year and still had it happen again. Twice.

I don’t have anything against cards. I love getting them. I want to be the kind of person who can send them. I am just realistic about my limitations, and mailing things has always been a personal hurdle.

But I am not alone. Christmas cards have fallen from around 2 billion sent 20 years ago to about half that now. That’s a steep decline. Is it a bad thing, though?

Cards aren’t the necessary catch-up on our lives that they were 30, 40 or 50 years ago. It’s an area where I give credit to social media. My aunt doesn’t need a picture of my kid to stick on her fridge. I post them regularly online and she always responds with funny comments and a thumbs-up. Instead of one annual letter wrapping up our comings and goings, my friends read about them when I share updates — often in real time.

The downside? Instead of that feeling of inferiority or insecurity you can get from reading someone’s carefully curated end-of-year letter, you can get it every time you check in on Twitter or Instagram. Social media assails us with the perfection of other people’s lives — a perfection that is as fake as a paper snowflake.

That’s why I haven’t given up on the idea of Christmas cards, despite how impossible they might be for me to actually complete. I still want to be able to reach out to the people I love individually and intentionally, not with the broad spray of a Facebook post that can be buried in a blizzard of a million other communications.

Someday I will pick out a card, write a personal note, sign it, find the addresses that I can never seem to locate when I need them, buy stamps and then finally drop the stack of envelopes in the mailbox.

That didn’t happen this year, and if I’m being completely honest, it probably won’t happen next year either.

But I still wish you a merry Christmas.