For the past thirteen years, A texts me on December 1st or sometimes the 2nd or 3rd and says: “Address?” I respond every couple of years with a new address, an unfortunate effect of moving too frequently. Then I say “Yrs too please!”, though she hasn’t moved in years, I am simply not ever as organized as I want to be. A and I met in 2008 when she moved into the spare room of the man I was dating. She was a spunky Italian babe, almost as short as me, but a few years older and wiser, and covered in tattoos. She had recently been dumped by a butch and I was eager to find ways to tell her that, despite my current cishet boyfriend/her new roommate, I was also queer. (I landed on renting The L Word on Netflix and making sure she was home when I watched.) A and I found ourselves in long talks in the kitchen about heartbreak, growing up poor and trashy, and about the healing love of pets – she came with a geriatric poodle named Elmo. A cried a lot the winter she lived with us (I mostly lived there too), from the grief of the breakup and then, just a month later, the grief of losing her grandfather. I loved her quickly; I knew I always would.
A and I haven’t really stayed in touch beyond an occasional social media comment or DM, a wedding once, and then this, these yearly December texts. The holiday card exchange in which this address reveal culminates is the sturdiest glue we have; a sparse but meaningful tether affirming that we are the kind of friends who send cards in the mail in the last month of the year. My holiday card list of friends reveals to me some of the most romantic friendships I have. “We may scarcely be in touch beyond this,” is written tacitly in the envelopes, “but in this month, on this holiday to which we may or may not have ideological commitments, I am thinking of you, and I want you to know it.”
I have much closer friends — those to whom I talk at least weekly, those whom I see regularly at the anarchist space in town, those with whom I share frequent mutual adoration online — who never send cards to nor receive cards from me. Sometimes that’s because the language of these friendships is different, sometimes it’s because I know they wouldn’t appreciate or know what to do with a holiday card, sometimes I just don’t know, despite clear affinity for one another, if they’d want to share their home address.
The holiday card friends are a mix of regular-contact friends and almost-never-contact friends, and when I make my yearly list of names I often feel some kind of somatic knowing that this is right, this person is a Holiday Card Friend. Some other examples, through the years: the esteemed professor who took my yoga classes for years in Boston and who made an effort to support my intellectual work even when I was cut loose from my academic contract; the young lesbian couple with whom I shared one (1) brunch, but whose warmth I feel in every social media photo they post, and every occasional Happy Birthday text we send; my former in-laws, who love dachshunds, and will forever receive the cutest Christmas hat-adorned wiener dog card I can find; my incarcerated pen pal, whom I’ve been writing since 2016, and who appreciates any support in honoring the Winter Solstice; my dear friend M who is, by far, the best snail mail communicator I’ve ever known, who sends not just holiday cards, but usually seasonal cards with hand-written notes about something or nothing at all. And then there are those who become additions: this year, my editor who has been battling cancer; last year, two friends who lost their fathers; years before that, a Hanukkah card to one of my TAs who brought so much energy to our Intro to Gender Studies course. It is a motley but sacred group, these touchstones from so many eras of life.
In a wonderful event at the local anarchist social center (The Rhizome House), Cindy Milstein opened the discussion with a Jewish prayer, then spoke about the need for ritual in our movements and our lives. It was a reminder that trust is built in relationships and that relationships are nurtured in repetition, holy gatherings, intentionality. This ritual of yearly, archaic connection – pen to paper, sealed envelopes, our hands to the hands of a postal worker – feels like a small way to fight alienation, to combat loneliness, to do a small thing, because I know for a lot of us, the big things feel a bit too out of reach.
In the past month, Rhizome was also home to two memorials. Two young people gone far too soon, two radical souls who I imagine felt too much the coldness of the world, who dreamed and worked for so much better, and didn’t feel enough of it in return. I didn’t know either of them well, so I won’t say more on what their close friends and loved ones have said in other places, but I will say these moments when we lose people, they can’t help but make us feel some urgency around showing up for one another. Maybe this is the problem though – we try to do it all, then we burn out and have capacity for almost nothing, and the cycle repeats.
I wonder if we committed more to the small things. Which is not me saying that sending holiday cards will save lives (they won’t, please don’t mistake this for that), but maybe it’s an example of a practice in reminding people that they are loved.
Isn’t all ritual a love-reminder? For nature or a spirit or each other, we kneel or bow or stamp envelopes and say, in the words of my favorite Marie Howe poem: “I am living. I remember you.”
Tonight I will write notes to people who have—in either fundamentally paradigm-shifting or entirely banal and ephemeral ways—shaped my life. I will remind them that I see them, that I love them; and just as my body will consecrate that love with the writing and the sealing and the stamping, I know their body too will receive it as they unpeel the glue of the triangle from the square, as they open the card, as they use their eyes to read. I put the holiday cards I receive on my mantel, I don’t know where others put theirs, but even if it’s in the recycling bin, I believe in the power of even a brief moment of connection.
All we have is this remembering, these connections. “This is what the living do.”
Lovely
'Isn't all ritual a love-reminder?'. Perfect. What a perfect way of thinking about the things we do each year. You are right to see love behind our actions, Raechal.