2016's Christmas card loot

The season's over, and I have to stash away my increasingly paltry collection of hard-copy Christmas cards. In my computer hard drive and Google Drive, I've saved the letters and cards sent by email.

I sent out over 20 cards and postcards by what's known as "happy mail," complete with stamps, as early as the first week of December. The addressees acknowledged my letters by email and text. I'm almost tempted to enclose a SASE, remember those? SASE stands for self-addressed stamped envelope.

Handwriting allows me to slow down. I guess it also brings down my blood pressure. It calms me. I'm able to reflect, rue, remember, regret, rejoice on paper. Not unlike keeping a journal only this time there is someone at the other end of the conversation. A friend asked me to send her a private message via her Facebook, which is faster, because she's "poor in snail mail." I assured her that sending mail by snail or donkey delights me so much so she needn't worry if my message is delayed by a week, 10 days or a month. She lives over in Western Australia and comes home twice a year at the most.

Here's the last year's mail, the last hand-delivered by the sister concerned.

Handmade's the best. This one's the handiwork of three-year-old Sophia, daughter of Liwa Araos and Archie Espanola. Made of dried leaves and shiny stickers. I like Liwa's penmanship--it indicates her lightness of being and overall cheerfulness.

Cousin Tess Lolarga Romero in Chicago is religious about her cards. They arrive as early as November. Perhaps she knows my husband is a stamp collector so she sticks assorted stamps on the envelop.

Beth Quirino Lahoz, president of the Technological Institute of the Philippines, unfailingly sends a yearly card. Sometimes, when I respond in kind, she emails quickly back upon receiving my card: "Despite the distance (not seeing each other), the connection thrives because you have also worked at it with your gracious letters."

Coming home from Baguio via Subic on New Year's Day, I found this on my desk--a card from my sister Gigi and inside were crisp 20-peso bills. She and our adopted sister Ruth Terania know my prepaid phone's limits and how I direly need the gadget for text blasts when supporting assorted causes. Thanks, baby sisters.

The season's happy mail

Is it always Christmas on Christmas Island?

Apart from the stamps glued on the envelope, pen pal Arlene puts other artistic touches on her envelope. I often wonder if the post office people who handle mail appreciate these.

The size of my crane Photos by Babeth Lolarga

Because I commute between two cities, snail or postal (but I now prefer to describe it "happy") mail is doubly delayed. I get to open them many days, stretching to weeks, after I arrive in Pasig or Baguio. But it is with a child's delight that I open them--it's almost like holding the sender by her hand or having her seated across you as you chat inside a cafe, warming your hands around your respective coffee cups while the rain pours outside.

I reached Pasig last night with four envelopes awaiting me. Except for one postmarked Quezon City, each came from a great distance: Tokyo, New South Wales in Australia and Chicago.

My friend Arlene, a Pinay artist who has made Japan her home, even enclosed what she called a "sushi crane" delicately folded from a piece of glossy magazine page with the color picture of a platter of, yes, sushi. Like Australia-based pen pal Giselle, the card she chose has proceeds going to a worthwhile cause: Medecins de Monde, an international NGO.

Keep the mail alive. Keep their senders and recipients happy.

Purchase of this card helps the Salvation Army in "fighting poverty, social and spiritual distress in Australia and New Zealand for almost 130 years." The army provides needy Australians 100,000 meals in a week, refuge to 500 abuse victims, among others. Peace, joy, hope for all, indeed!

The beneficiary for this card is The Hadley School for the Blind in Winnetka, Illinois.

The season's wishes are also rendered in Braille. Thanks, Cousin Tess and family!

Dr. Beth Quirino-Lahoz's card that changes yearly features a photo from her collection of doors and windows. Photo shows the door of a cathedral in Avila, Spain. Beth heads the Technological Institute of the Philippines in Quezon City and Manila. TIP is committed to teaching knowledge and truth and learning values.

Where Have All the Christmas Cards Gone?

A few days ago, I received the one, the only genuinely printed Christmas card of 2009, if you don’t count the little tags that accompanied gifts and the virtual cards from family members and friends that I picked up from various Internet sites (American Greetings, Jacqui Lawson cards, etc.) and Facebook.

Did I just miss the passing of an era? Or is the old-fashioned Christmas card, whether store-bought or hand-made, the one you slip into an envelope, seal, address to the intended recipient and travel to the post office to mail, dead? Not while I’m around, I say.

I normally have my Christmas mail done by the end of November of each year to avoid the rush. Sometime in the 1990s, when there were still no corner Internet shops, I sent off 40-plus cards, each with a personal, handwritten message.

Friend Gladys Lyn Lapuz, who now designs cards with so much panache from her iPhone application, shared the information that Elizabeth Bishop, one of my favorite poets, wrote nearly 50 letters in a day while living as an expatriate in Brazil. That tidbit must have sunk deep in my subconscious when I fired off all those cards.

During the endless sorting and filing of old papers my partner and I have been doing this month, I came upon a huge bag full of Yule cards I saved over the years. These moved with me from our Santa Ana, Manila, apartment to the new house my parents built in 1975 in Pasig, then to Antipolo where I began my own married life and family, and finally to Baguio. These survivors were the ones I did not get around to pasting on the pages of my scrapbooks. A number were addressed to my parents. The salutations in some are very telling of how women were regarded in the ’60s. “Dear Dr. Lolarga and wife” is an example.

To reduce the amount of paper we’ve decided to keep, I’ve cut off the half where the greetings are printed, thrown them away, unless the sender was someone particularly special, and kept the half where the picture/design lies. I mean to recycle this “new” batch of Christmas postcards.

I may not receive the same amount of snail-mailed cards in return as in the past (the efficient email has seen to that), but I so look forward to another November of handwriting reflections on months just past, recording highs and lows in my family’s life and visiting the city post office where the lady who hands me the stamps I need smiles at me for I am to her a familiar face.

My one Christmas card of 2009 shows Chicago-based cousin Tessie Lolarga Romero, her children and grandchild.