I Should've Started My Christmas Cards Earlier

Like in August.

I gotta give props to those people who write Hallmark cards, filling them with generic sentiment that really does do a nice job of emulating true human emotion. I get way too into this holiday stuff, and I insist on sending each of my friends personalized holiday greetings, which would be a lot easier if I'd actually seen half of these people in the past year. It totally sucks how we're not all peripatetic tribesmen living together as small bands of hunter-gatherers, droving the livestock to the lowlands in the winter and back to the highlands in the summer. Bullet trains and unlimited weekend minutes have ruined society!

So it's taking like an hour to write three sentences on each card, and that's of course preceeded by half an hour of worrying that my recipients are going to realize that I'm recycling the leftover Christmas cards from previous years, another half-hour convincing myself that no one's going to care if I'm recycling leftover Christmas cards from previous years, and five minutes of testing my pen, making sure it hasn't run out of ink. No, I don't think that I'm obsessing: Christmas is pretty much the only time of year you can send any old person superficial, meaningless greetings and I'm gonna totally milk the occassion. I'd send people Happy Columbus Day cards if I didn't think I'd get an e-mail back saying, "Uh, why the hell did you send me a Columbus Day card? I mean, it's not even a real holiday."

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Addendum:

So right around 11:30 PM, the cable goes out and suddenly I decide, screw it. Just getting my friends' addresses is like pulling teeth, as if everyone I know got up and joined the Identity Theft Paranoia Society. So fuck you all: you're getting generic, perfunctory holiday greetings, like I say I hope you'll have a merry Christmas, but I no longer care one way or another. I don't even care if you celebrate Hannukah; you're getting a merry Christmas card and if you spend December 25 at the movies watching love blossom between a hot Australian chick and a giant ape, then too bad for you.

I enjoyed spreading Christmas cheer, but I'm actually pretty proud of myself for this new Grinch phase I'm going through. Maybe next year, I'll get all into re-gifting and giving people socks for Christmas and dumping lottery tickets into the Secret Santa pool. Holiday misanthropy rules!