Christmas Cards Frenzy!!

For the first 21 years of my life, I didn't really get cards. Don't get me wrong, I received them. I received a lot of them. But I didn't understand the point of them. Or at least, I didn't understand why some people couldn't conceive of an occasion when they would give someone a gift without including a card. Cards are something you read, take the money out of, and then throw away--or, if they're pretty, you put them on your dresser and then they eventually fall behind it and you find them three years later and THEN you throw them away*. Alright, so maybe I put them in a box somewhere and look at them every once in a while and they make me happy. Point is, I was not a card-giver until recently. I blame The Paper Umbrella (if ever you're in Regina, you should go). There were some pretty amazing cards there. There was a card there for when you want to invite your secret lover for a weekend getaway to a charming village somewhere. It was great. I began to see the merit of cards. Cards are actually kind of awesome.

This is how I ended up in Desart, being seduced by anything with gold sparkles on it. I ended up purchasing a box of the most bizarre Christmas cards I had ever seen. You know, the sort of cards that have 8-foot-tall winged reindeer on them, in an unironic, totally in earnest, very whimsical sort of way. Their designer had clearly been on an acid trip when he/she was creating these cards. I took them home and began excitedly filling them out. Then I realized that I still don't understand how to do cards. For Christmas cards, a normal person would probably write something like this: "Merry Christmas! Wish you were here! I'll be spending Christmas getting drunk while wearing a funny hat! Love, Alex." See? Something to do with the holidays. But when I fill out a card, I can't seem to write about anything except the card. So my cards look more like this: "Hi Alex! You may be wondering why I sent you this weird Christmas card. Don't worry, I'm being ironic! I couldn't resist purchasing something so warped! The person who made it was clearly on drugs! Love, Amy."** What a lovely Christmas card.

After I filled out each card with a variation of the above drug-trip message, I suddenly got really paranoid that the recipients were going to compare cards. What if they all realized that I wrote the same un-christmassy thing inside of each of their cards? The card would lose what few shreds of meaning it had. I was mass-producing my endearing quirkiness! (This dilemma remains unresolved. But anyway.)

I've been bit by the card-giving bug, now. I plan on getting more (and less drug-induced, Christmas-hallucination-themed) cards this very evening. Maybe I'll get generic ones this time, though, to save myself some writing. They will say things like "Look! There's a snowflake on this card!" or "Ironically, this card is made of a tree and ALSO has a tree on it!" or "SPARKLES!!!". Maybe if I write enough of them I'll eventually get the hang of writing "Merry Christmas! All the best! Love Amy" instead.

*unless of course it's an awesome card that contains, say, a comic strip explaining why I don't have a backbone, in which case I cherish it always. Or if it has a heartfelt message written inside. Or if the card is complementing me on that time I looked fabulous while getting the mail, and has rhinestones on it.

**I do this with postcards, too. If I send you a card with a picture of a sheep on the front of it, it's far more likely that my card will be telling you about the sheep in the picture than that it will be telling you about my adventures in Ireland.