I’m sure he exists, but I have never seen the mailman where I live in Mexico. Regardless, I still peek into the letterbox every day, the way I used to all those years I lived in Arizona when there was likely to be an envelope marked By Air Mail, Par Avion waiting for me in the mailbox in front of our house. My Mexican mail amounts to an electricity bill (without an envelope let alone a stamp) delivered once every two months by someone I have never seen. There’s the occasional business card from someone who wants to wash my car, sell my house, or extend my eyelashes. And once a year, after Christmas, I’ll find in the mailbox the brown envelope I’ve been waiting for. There it was yesterday morning, with its tell-tale Air Mail stickers and a silhouette of Queen Elizabeth II on a postage stamp and its perfect timing. Inside it was the Northern Ireland calendar for the coming year. And, my heart did a little happy dance . . .
The Northern Ireland 2024 appointment calendar features a dozen beautiful photographs of places I never really appreciated when I was growing up there – Belfast’s Botanic Gardens, “Game of Thrones” filming locations on the Antrim coast, or the Mountains of Mourne sweeping, as only they do, down to the sea. My mother has sent a NI calendar every year to our relatives in America or Australia, and ever since I became one of those far away relatives in the late 1980s when I emigrated to the USA and then moved to Mexico four years ago, I too have been the recipient of a Northern Ireland calendar. No matter what else is happening in the world that might affect the mail, my calendar has arrived unscathed every single year and almost always before January 1.
Before Facebook, email, WhatsApp, and whatever else you’re having, my mother and I exchanged hundreds of letters and greeting cards and packages. For over a decade after I left Northern Ireland, I knew to expect, at least once a week, a red, white, and blue trimmed letter that was its own envelope. Marked By Air Mail and Par Avion with a postage stamp bearing the image of a member of the Royal Family or some other famous person, for instance the drummer of the other Queen. Ma’s letter was always crammed with all the news she could squeeze onto one page – who had died, how much it had been raining, what daddy was planting in the garden, and how distance is no good. The water is wide.
I continue to marvel at the journey of the fragile airmail letter; all the inspections it passed and the numerous hands it passed through on its way from a red pillar box in a rainy village in Northern Ireland and over the Atlantic Ocean and on to a desert city in Arizona, where a nice man in a little US mail truck would retrieve it from his big Santa sack and drop it in my red brick mail box.
Along with the airmail envelope/letter, there were other letters too, written on lined pale blue notebook pages my mother had numbered and folded with clippings from The Belfast Telegraph, recipes, packages of flower seeds, death notices. My parents – and I know they are not alone in this particular practice – always turned to “the deaths” before reading anything else in the newspaper. I used to roll my eyes over what I thought was depressing and very Irish behavior, but now that I’m older than my parents were when I was a teenager, I view it differently. It’s pure acknowledgement that someone used to be here. Someone left a mark, blazed a trail, touched a heart – someone will be missed.
Those pages of my mother’s exquisite blue handwriting bore ink-smudges and creases, occasionally a tea-stained ring of her cup; and, I’m convinced, a barely-there scent of Fairly Liquid dish-soap.
Letter-writing was as prominent in our lives as the Sunday roast. With so many of the extended family away in America or Australia and no such thing as cheap phone plans – or cheap phones for that matter, there weren’t just letters, there were birthday and Christmas cards, St Patrick’s Day cards, sympathy cards, parcels (the Christmas box) and scenic postcards. Of the latter, nobody seemed to mind that along with “wish you here,” the writer often put it all out there on a postcard for the postman and anyone else to read if they encountered it on its journey. Oversharing was never an issue and certainly not the phenomenon it became after 2008 when Webster’s New World Dictionary made it their ‘New Word of the Year.’
Maybe it’s because we overshare the way social media allows us to, that we don’t see a need to share at all in handwritten letters or postcards or Christmas cards. I find it odd, given that we’re supposed to be more connected than ever, especially after a pandemic that kept us so far apart. Sitting here in Mexico, I can tell you with stunning accuracy what my friend is having for dinner in Belfast tonight. The last time I sent her a Christmas card was 1991. We haven’t talked in years, but we’re “connected” – just like everybody else on the digital super duper highway – which I think means we’re probably not connected at all.
When my lovely friend Rhonda visited me in real life (IRL) this past year, she gave me an envelope emblazoned in black marker: “Ma. (For Christmas).” I hid it so I wouldn’t be tempted to open it until Christmas, and subsequently couldn’t find it until today. When I read the hand-written wishes on the card inside from my daughter, well, you know the rest. My heart did a little happy dance. She could have just texted me the way she does almost every day, but she sat down and sent me a proper Christmas card. And with it came the realization that this is the first Christmas where I have not received a single Christmas card in the mail. Not one. There have been lots of online greetings – virtual Christmas hugs and Santa hat emojis exchanged on Facebook and in texts and elsewhere. What happened to the Christmas Card tradition in my life? Where is the person I used to be?
For decades, that person had a leather address book that was consulted on a day in early December set aside for writing cards to everyone I knew – friends, neighbors, extended family members, colleagues, the insurance man. I made sure to consult the post office for the final dates for posting cards and parcels for delivery in time for Christmas – to and from the UK, Ireland, USA, Canada, Australia. My mother always double-checked the last day to mail packages to her far-flung relatives in America and Australia – and it is no fiction that those packages were indeed of the brown paper variety and tied up with string (butcher string). I also remember – and I think I got this from my mother – I used to put a little check mark next to the name of the person who hadn’t sent a card the year before. I sent one regardless, because … it’s Christmas, and to invoke Love Actually, “if you can’t say it at Christmas, eh?” Still, it would cross my mind that maybe they had been sick or somebody had died and the newspaper forgot to include the death notice or maybe they just decided to join the growing number of people who aren’t “doing” Christmas cards anymore.
When I was young, I remember rushing into our hall as soon as I heard the thud when a pile of Christmas cards fell through the letter box. Bearing postmarks from all over the world, it was a feast of international communication. There were always at least a hundred Christmas cards hanging on string draped across our living room walls. The fanciest cards had pride of place on the mantelpiece or on the phone table where everybody could see them, pick them up and read the message inside for, in the following order: “Betty, Eric, Yvonne, and Keith.” There were often duplicate cards featuring Dickensian winter scenes or perhaps the Wise Men with presents for the baby Jesus, but we still had to display both in case the sender visited and noticed his card wasn’t there. If memory serves me right, my mother also had a stash of favorite cards that she just wouldn’t part with and they would show up in different places around the house each year, like ornaments. From gaudy to sophisticated, to home-made with glitter and fake snow – there was room for all of them. There’s no room for Facebook messages and Christmassy updates on the mantelpiece.
But back to my heart’s little happy dance.
Typically, the Northern Ireland calendar requires three magnets to attach it to my refrigerator where I will see it every day. I love its photographs of places from six counties where the sun is always shining. I love the big white squares for each day of the week and all the reminders of Bank Holidays that don’t coincide with any holidays here, and Mother’s Day is on a different day too. First, I’ll mark on it the birthdays that are already committed to memory. These are ‘red letter days.’ Then I’ll think about when the insurance is due or when the oil needs changing and those will go on the calendar too. These are the opposite of red letter days, but they cannot be ignored. I will put a big circle around the date of a special event like a Bruce Springsteen concert or a trip back home and subsequently count down to these with big red X’s that fill up each square on the calendar, the way a 5th grader writes on the corner of the chalkboard how many days are left before school’s out for summer (about 150).
In spite of all the productivity apps on my phone and the online calendar attached to my work email which asks me to RSVP to Thanksgiving, Christmas, every public holiday in the US, and even my own birthday, the Northern Ireland wall calendar remains the mother of all calendars. The only calendar to equal it was the one I used to make for my parents that featured photos of my daughter, her daddy, and me. It had a different family photo to correspond to the month of the year … the three of us making snow angels for December, or watching fireworks explode in the sky over Morro Bay for July. You get the idea. But without him, the home-made family photo calendar seemed wrong, a reminder that he wasn’t here any more, so I turned instead to the beautiful Arizona Highways wall calendar. When it arrives sometime in January 2024, it will be the calendar hanging in my parent’s kitchen in rural Derry, even though Mother’s Day is on a different day in Ireland and also the USA doesn’t do Bank Holidays.
In the digital age, we’d all be forgiven for thinking the days of the paper calendar are numbered. After all, look what happened to letter-writing and Christmas cards in my family. But then again, look what happened to vinyl records. Vinyl went away and then it occurred to somebody that tangibility matters, and vinyl came back with a vengeance.
Like a handwritten letter or a paper calendar, a vinyl record is tangible and an investment of time. Before emails and emojis and texts and Tweets and online calendar notifications and beeps and alerts, there was a time when we didn’t mind investing time in letters that would help close the distance between us. Letters required a little more labor from us, a little more time to shape our news, one sentence a time, with the best words available to us. Letters and Christmas Cards and postcards force us to slow down even as the world around us spins at ever-increasing velocity.
I miss all of that and all that Simon Garfield says I – and others – have lost by relinquishing “the post, the envelope, a pen, a slower cerebral whirring, the use of the whole of our hands and not just the tips of our fingers.”
I have an idea. Maybe it’s a resolution just in time for the New Year. I’m going to set aside one day each month to mail a letter or a card to my parents and to my daughter. It will be a red letter day, and one day around this time next year, I’ll be back here to tell you all about it.
May 2024 be good to you and yours. Happy New Year.
