Christmas Cards...

I am so far behind on my Christmas card list that there are people on my list who do not know about our last five children. Such is military life that you miss one year and all your friends have moved and you no longer have up to date addresses for each other.

I don't want to fill out all those Christmas cards only to have them returned because my friends have moved six times since the last time I wrote them. That's a lot of wasted postage. I keep thinking I'm going to take my address book and spend a few hours on the computer looking people up at that invasive Zaba search site, but it's that would only work for those friends who have rather unusual names. The Smiths, Jones, Connors, and Johnsons of our lives would still be lost. It's not just about Christmas cards, all of those people we'd really like to find and see how they are doing.

Meanwhile, I have a small Christmas list of people I do know how to find. But I packed the Christmas cards I bought on sale last year and they are in the depths of the summer kitchen, where Jenny and Pip worked hard at arranging the boxes and cartons- by shape and size, instead of by order of need. So we won't be getting them out.

So... if I get to the small but current list of Christmas folks, I think it will be postcards. Not to be cheap, but the postage is less for post cards, so if I've missed a few current addresses it won't sting quite as much if they are returned.

Kim, who blogs about Life in a Shoe, made homemade cards with her little ones, and that sounds like fun.

One or two Christmases, back in the days when we were not on speaking terms with our income because we had not been properly introduced, I used old Christmas cards and resent them as post-cards. You carefully tear or cut the top of the card off (the card you use has to be the right size, of course). Write on the back just as you would on a postcard (draw a line down the middle, address and stamp on the right side, short note on the left). Do it properly and nobody can tell what you did, unless you make the mistake of sending the same card back to the sender, but that's so tacky that I am sure none of our readers would do that. This way, all the people on your list gets a different card, and you can personally choose the right card for the right person.