My, How Times Change. Sort of.

I can remember when I was a little girl how my grandma reacted when the Christmas cards started rolling in. She came from the old school, "back when people were classy," she used to say. That meant that if you were going to send her a Christmas card, you had better take the time to write a personal message to her in that card. Don't even think about sending a generic Christmas letter, typed up without much thought and copied off until the printer ran out of ink. She wanted a piece of you all to herself. She told me to never turn into one of those lazy housewives who wouldn't even take the time to jot a few sentences to the people who were most important. I actually chuckled out loud the first year I sent out a Christmas letter. I folded hers, stuffed it into the envelope, and wrote on the outside, "Yours is the original. Everyone else got copies." I'm sure she was mortified.

Now, my mother is horrified because I told her I didn't want to waste paper, envelopes, and stamps sending out my Christmas letter. I thought she would die when I told her I was seriously considering just sending it out in a mass e-mail. "That's just trashy." I had actually been joking, but with Christmas less than two weeks away, I haven't bought cards or pretty paper, we haven't taken a family picture, and the trashy, mass e-mail option is looking extraordinary. I will continue to contemplate the pros and cons as I read my grandma's Christmas letter...