An internet friend announced on her blog that she has decided not to send holiday cards this year. Her habit was to send nearly 100 cards. Receiving about 20 in return last year has forced her to confront what seems a lack of interest.

I am wondering about the same thing.

This is the season when in years past I would make a decision about sending cards.

Last year, we sent only a few. For a long time, I drew or printed cards (linocuts or other hand printing), and more recently I’ve designed cards with my photos. I sent out 70 to 90. It was my habit for a long time—Gary says for more than 30 years, but I recently came across cards from when our firstborn was infant, which means I have made cards since 1980, and I also designed cards for Forest Ridge School when I taught there in the late 1970s. The card shown above is from 1978. Cards were my most important gift for the season and planning them was something I squeezed in between everything else, but always settled by Thanksgiving. Let’s say that was my practice for 45 years, most of my adult life.

We received fewer than 20 holiday cards last year, and that is not unusual. One year we received 12. I am not a good correspondent myself, and being torn about sending out cards this year feels disingenuous. I have a friend who sends me actual cards and thank you notes. I am not that good.

One year, after my mother died, I instead sent a bulk email with a photo and text because that was what I could manage at the holidays. One year I vowed to write a yearly illustrated storybook for the grandchildren and nieces, but my first effort garnered the same percentage of responses as holidays cards, so I gave up the idea.

A friend, after the death of her poet-partner, emailed to let me know that my early cards are among the papers in the library collection of that poet’s work. I didn’t know how to respond. Perhaps some people receiving our cards haven’t known how to respond? I sent handwoven blanket to a relative for her new baby and never heard back. She was busy with a new baby. I get that.

Am I willing to invest the time making cards? Will anyone care either way? Do I? We rarely hear from anyone other than a few old and close friends. I am not on Facebook, and I increasingly find people fail to check their email. Texting has replaced phone calls and other more direct contact. It makes me sad. I would like to think people appreciate receiving cards and simply fail to find time or to appreciate how much we appreciate hearing from them. So maybe an email will suffice?

There is something else tangled up in this quandary.

One of my goals this year was to put ink in the brand new 00 Rapidograph pen I have been hoarding for (10-15) years and draw. I do believe in setting goals and also in keeping such promises to myself. The pen has remained in its packaging. But in college and for a long time afterwards, I daily wrote notes with a triple ought or double ought (000 or 00) pen tip. The tiny tip often clogged. But that’s not the reason I have not drawn much or anything recently. I had good intentions to illustrate an ABC book I put together after our first granddaughter was born. I had made only one copy, using photos stolen from the internet, but my intentions are nearly a decade old. Ever since, I intended to ink my own versions of each page: “Even the Queen…” There was no time to do this when I was teaching, so that was a goal I revisited and set for 2022. “Fill the pen and illustrate something.”

But I haven’t done it yet. Not the pen. Not the illustration.

I got sidetracked by weaving and our travel east and west and what else? I cannot think. Running, presenting to OCTE, blogging, and revising two old stories. Trying not to worry about the elections. Beach walks.

We saw a Borzoi on the beach yesterday. I went over and talked to the owner: “It’s not often we see a sighthound on the beach!” The owner was so pleased we knew what a sighthound was. After talking for a while she said she’d heard about me a long time ago, “You had two Afghans.”

“We had six,” I told her, which was mostly true. For a while we had more than a dozen with a litter of eight puppies in the house. For a couple of years we had only five. And then they aged and died, and the first cat died at 19 and the second cat who showed up to fill the gap also died, and now we have no pets at all.

We had six dogs when I designed this card below from 1988, listing our family from oldest to youngest. (Five Afghan Hounds and a smooth Saluki.) I asked each member of the family what they wanted and wrote what I understood they told me. (Gary was kidding about Pat Paulson, I think.) It was a paste-up with the tiny full-scale drawings in ink on onion-skin, as I recall.

The card above was folded once to fit in a #10 envelope. I have plenty of envelopes of various sizes and some very nice papers stashed. I have everything I need. I could make cards. I could do that. I could manage two goals at once: use the pen and make the cards. But…