I wrote our Christmas letters on Sunday night during the Vikings/ Raider’s football game. The game gave me plenty of time to put a handwritten note on each card as the only score came late, in the last few minutes of the game. It was good to hold each card in my hand and give thanks for the people whose names I wrote on the envelopes. Christmas cards are actually a wonderful ritual, a way to stay in touch with friends. It is one way to remember people and places for it all does go by so quickly.
I truly realized just how fast it goes as I helped my mom write out her Christmas cards this year. She’s part of a card group in her apartment building and they recycle old cards into new ones. She had made most of her Christmas cards. We added a short xeroxed note to each one.
The hardest part was going through her address book to address the cards. As we went through the alphabet I would ask her what about this person? Her response too often was “no, they’re dead, don’t send a card to them.” At 88, I guess you would expect that more than half of your address book would contain the names of folks that are no longer around, but still it was so very hard. I knew most of the names in her address book and found myself silently giving thanks for each of them too.
After the Vikings game on Sunday, Tim and I decided to watch a Christmas movie. Ironically, I found the movie, Klaus. It is the story of a postman, Jesper, who has failed his training and so is sent away to remote, northern Smeerensburg. He is charged with the task of collecting 6,000 letters in a year. Smeerensburg is a troubled, cold and dark place where a generations long feud has kept the town divided from one another.
A change for the whole town begins with a child’s letter. The letter expresses the pain of the division through a drawing of children crying. Klaus, a widower and toymaker, mistakenly gets the child’s letter. He answers the boy by giving him a wooden frog. The letter and the toy are both delivered by Jesper, the postman. Transformation for Klaus, Jesper and the whole town happens by the sharing of letters and gifts. As Klaus observes, “A true selfless act always sparks another.” This 2019 animated movie is truly beautiful.
On Monday morning I got a text from a friend, Bruce. He is a retired Presbyterian minister and also a widower. Bruce is not a toymaker but a painter. Over the years I have always looked forward to receiving his beautiful black ink Christmas cards. He often paints birch trees and white pines. Bruce hadn’t gotten my card yet because I had just put it in the mail that very morning, but somehow we were both thinking of each other. He wanted me to know that he didn’t have the energy for making cards anymore but that he was doing okay. We made plans for a walk together when the days are longer.
Bruce’s wife, Ava, had also been a minister and a friend. She died in the late Fall of 2006 from complications of scleroderma. In preparing to lead her going home service, Bruce gave me several of her letters and a journal to read. In one of her first letters to Bruce she wrote to him, “We’re never really far apart when deep you lie within my heart.” And in her last journal entry she wrote, “I believe in Christ’s resurrection and I believe in the resurrection of me. . . My charge on earth is to glorify you, to share the good news and to live a life that others can recognize as you living within me.”
Ava touched so many lives through her kindness. I am grateful her writings and other people’s letters, words on a page that I can hold on to and remember each of them.
Christmas cards allow us to share in the joy and pain of one another lives. This time of year, I love getting the mail at the end of the day. Along with the ads and bills, there are real letters. Letters with pictures of weddings and grandchildren, vacations and more. The letters bring a little light in the December darkness.
Who knows what a letter can do? The change in Smeerensburg all began with a letter. And as Klaus noted, “A true selfless act always sparks another.” Write on!
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