We're just lucky, I guess, Eliza.

I can't remember when I last bothered to send Christmas cards. My mother used to spend hours shopping for them and writing them, and would send me out with a fistful in the week before Christmas to deliver them by hand to people who lived within walking distance of our front door. (Her idea of walking distance was not restrictive; I remember spending whole afternoons hiking around in the freezing dusk.) But sometime in the early '80s the whole idea started to feel like Too Much Trouble; also, my friends kept moving, as did I, and we couldn't keep track of each other.

Now the primary function of a Christmas card is to contain the cheque or gift card presented to a niece or nephew whose needs and wants are completely mysterious to us. Those cards must be amusing. Gift cards for adults (never cheques) go in cards with a religious theme, if they are for Himself's sisters, or funny if they are for my brothers. Cards with New Yorker cartoons on them work well.

Stagecoaches and robins are cute and nostalgic, but too British for us Canadians, even though quite a few of the kin-group are immigrants from Wales.