Our friends love us!

[Xipe Totec]

A few days ago I read a lounge thread dissing people who send "catch up letters" in their Christmas cards. The argument went something like this:

If you're really close friends you don't need to catch up because you should know everything that's going on in their lives. If you don't, then you're not really close friends, so do they really care? Why bother?

This made me feel guilty because I'm one of those people who write a "catch up letter" every year and I get "catch up letters" from some (not all) of our friends. I began to wonder if it was arrogant presumption on my part to think that these people, who I knew once upon a time really gave I flying flip whether they heard from me or not. The problem we have is that our family has moved so often that we ended up leaving a lot of wonderful people everywhere. Some of our acquaintances have also moved around and we now have a list of friends that literally spans the globe. Some of them we have not physically seen for over 20 years but we still love them and (we think) they love us.

This year we sent our regular "catch up" letter with our family news, mentioning which of our friends made the trek to Boston to see us, saying how disappointed we were that Kerry & Edwards did not win, and we included a picture of the five of us standing at the Chickatawbut road look-out wearing our Kerry Edwards t-shirts, with the Boston skyline in the background.

We got cards and letters from many of the regulars, but we also got one reply that arrived today that stood out. Two friends of ours who we left behind in Houston six years ago did not send a Christmas card. Instead, they air-freighted a live orchid from Hawaii to wish us a happy new year (my wife is a gardener and keeps live orchids in the house).

All I can say is, I guess they liked the "catch up letter"!