Once you start sending out Christmas letters, you feel obligated to send one every year. I didn’t realize that when I sent out my first letter back in 1997, but I’m not sure I can stop now.
When I was preparing my 2002 letter, I had an encounter with writer’s block and struggled to put it together in time. Finally, on December 23, I realized the letters just weren’t going to go out on time. So I decided to send them on April Fools Day. It was a good plan, but the way it worked out was that my letters went out in mid-August. It wasn’t until 2006 that I managed to have my Christmas cards (the 2005 edition) arrive on April 1.
Of course, by then, people were expecting my Christmas cards to arrive off-season, so there was only one thing to do: My 2006 Christmas cards arrived just in time for Christmas.
Changing the dates around gets kind of predictable after a while. Folks know the cards going to be off-season, they just don’t know exactly when. So this year I decided to send them out at Christmas for the second year in a row.
But have you ever thought about the fact that the term “Christmas Card” is ambiguous? (Likewise for “Holiday Card.”) Aside from Hallmark, who says it has to be a greeting card?