The Card Nazi...

When I was a kid, my mom had a system. It was a system of weeding out lazy Christmas card givers. Each year she would write down a check mark in her handy dandy notebook if she received a card from you. She would compare this checked list to the list of people that she sent cards to... if you did not send a card to my mother in three year's time you were knocked off of her Christmas card list faster than a speeding bullet. My mother did not fool around with this. She was serious about the time old moral tradition of receiving in order to give... or something like that.

Well, as my Christmas card list get larger... the number of cards we receive gets fewer and fewer.

Do people not like me? Am I annoying? (please do not answer those questions in my comment box.)

Is it the high cost of stamps and the fear of getting shot at the post office that keeps people from sending out Christmas greetings?

I don't know, but I have had enough! I decided to monitor our Christmas cards this year. I sent to everyone on my list (I apologize for not sending out Christmas letters to all of you who emailed me... it was getting expensive and I had to decide between you and a Christmas ham. The Ham won.)

I printed out my Christmas list and got out my red pen and started checking away. Now I have come to a dilemma. Do I stop sending to my Great Aunt on my Father's side who is blind and deaf because she has not sent me a card is 3 years, or do I keep her on-even though she can't read my letter and she can't hear it when someone else reads it to her. Hmmm. And what about my mother-in-law who seems to think she is exempt from sending out a Christmas greeting... do I knock her off the list as well? What about childhood friends who have stopped sending cards and some distant cousins of whom I have never met and have not received a card from them since 1993? Do I say "so long sucker" to them?

As I was sorting through my list I realized that I may very well have been discarded from their list for some unknown reason. It was not because I stopped sending cards to them, it was apparently because they want me to stop sending to them!

Next year it looks like my list will consist of the neighbor's dog (who left a nice Christmas greeting on my front lawn) and my college, who sent me a nice Christmas greeting with a plea for money.

Thank God it is January and I can stop being to cheery. No Card For You!