It is the time of the year when we really look forward to going to the mailbox. All year long we get a lot of items in the mail that we don’t appreciate. We’ve never checked the price, but think that offers of extended warranties for our vehicles don’t make sense for us. Both of our vehicles are 12 years old and we prefer paying their maintenance costs over the cost of newer vehicles. Since we aren’t aware of ever inquiring about vehicle maintenance plans, we don’t know why the companies insist on calling us and sending us letters that look like they might be official, but we’ve gotten pretty good at identifying the letters and placing them in the recycling bin before opening them. From time to time they come up with a way of making them look like they might be something else and we open one reminding us that most letters where we can’t identify the sender aren’t important.

We are also annoyed by the number of sales flyers and catalogues we get from companies from which we have ordered an item online. If we use the companies to shop online, we are unsure of why they think we need a paper catalogue.

Since we have opted for paperless billing and paperless banking, there aren’t too many important items that come in our mail. We occasionally will receive an explanation of benefits or a bill from a health care provider. Despite all of the attention given to paperless billing and payment, we find that health care providers generally do not employ state of the art methods when it comes to billing. We hope they are better at keeping up with medical practices than they are at keeping up with business practices.

In addition to not being candidates for extended car warranties, we probably aren’t good candidates for new car purchases, either. That doesn’t stop one car dealership in Rapid City, South Dakota from having updated their mailing list to include our new address after two moves. Cruise ship companies are also good at following us through multiple moves. They are still sending flyers to my mother who died in 2011, and who lived with us at that time. One company has a unique misspelling of her name that makes it easy to identify other companies who have accessed their mailing list.

We do occasionally use the coupons that local grocery stores send. We don’t intend to purchase ready made meals that arrive via package deliver services.

But this time of the year we do look forward to our daily stop at the mailbox because it brings us greetings from friends. We enjoy catching up on the news of people who live in distant places with whom we might not carry on regular correspondence, but who send us greetings at Christmas time.

There are a lot of different and interesting styles of Christmas greetings. Some people send a card only. Some cards have a line or two of personal greeting and news. Some contain only a signature. In recent years there has been an uptick in custom cards. We like the ones that at least have pictures of significant events. We pour over them for images of children to see how they have grown. We get cards with wedding pictures of people we knew as children and are amazed at how quickly they have grown.

We get a few multiple page letters with a digest of the previous year. Some of these require a few minutes of concentration to follow events in the lives of relatives whom we may not have ever met. One style for these is the yearly digest that goes through the events of the previous year month by month. Another style is the catalogue of family members with the highlights of the year. Some of our friends keep us informed of their extended families, so that we can keep up with people we cherish who might not send us cards, but with whom we can keep up because of the letters of a parent or grandparent.

There don’t seem to be as many correspondents who have come up with poetry as has been the case some years, but we did receive one letter with a humorous poem set to the rhythm of a familiar song.

For years and years when Christmas was a very busy and hectic time for us, we sent our annual greeting late. Sometimes we got it out by Valentine’s Day. Sometimes we got it out earlier or later. Some years we never got a letter produced though our intentions were there and we were a bit disappointed with our failure. Now, however, we are retired. We don’t have a heavy work load around Christmas. We still weren’t motivated to get to work on our letter at Thanksgiving, but we have taken the majority of them to the post office and are down to just a few more that need to have personal notes added and be addressed. Maybe our friends won’t notice the difference, but we are a bit surprised that we should get all of them in the mail before Christmas even if some will arrive after December 25.

Email has helped us as we are able to send out some of our annual greetings as email attachments. This is our preferred way of corresponding with those who send us their greetings by email and the way we keep in touch with most of our overseas friends. Because we draft our annual letter on the computer, it is easy to send it as an attachment to an electronic message.

But we have enjoyed spending a few evenings sitting at our dining room table and addressing letters. With us we have the cards and letters we have already received to re-read. Often a letter we have received sparks a comment we will write on a letter we are sending. The process of remembering friends is very meaningful to us.

Who knows? Maybe we’ll tackle the job even earlier next year.