Who would have thought that a wet windy afternoon spent cosy indoors, writing Christmas cards would have felt so significant?
Along with with many thousands of others my Christmas Card list had dwindled to just a few for closest family and friends, while everyone else received a generic social media goodwill message. To be honest Merry Christmas online always felt a bit soulless .. but I consoled myself that it saved time and postage costs and was only what people expect in these modern digital times. So easy to post 3 or 4 words of greeting '@everyone' in between peeling the potatoes and laying the Christmas dinner table. Scarcely a thought given and scant attention given to the reams of messages sent onto my own feed ..mostly from people I know little about and never met in person.
So sitting down today making a list of those I really want to know I care about them and that I am thinking about each one individually as I write their card .. finding a few personal words for each .. smiling at memories of how I know them and what they mean to me almost feels like an act of rebellion. Reclaiming connections and letting the people in my life know that they are important and worth more to me than an impersonal shared message. Very therapeutic - I feel as though I have reconnected with the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future.
I mourn for the younger generations who have never written personal cards and messages, or thank you letters for gifts received. To whom the norm is to share a greeting designed by someone else or even worse made by AI and devoid of any human emotion.
It seems to me that we have many necessary skills which make us uniquely the people that we are. And the more we lose those skills the harder it will be for us to relearn them.
I intend to go into next year enhancing and preserving the abilities that I have rather than giving them away to the machine of modern living. It will be interesting to see how much of a challenge walking in this direction will be.
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