season's greetings!!!

Another sure sign of the change of seasons besides the Linwood Monroe charity auction is the arrival of Christmas and other holiday greetings cards. We had a great collection this year and I enjoyed almost all of them. We're fortunate to live in a house that's hosted a number of homeowners over a relatively short timespan so we get not only the cards addressed to us but those intended for people several notches down the title opinion from us. Part of me wants to return the cards from people we don't know and tell them that their erstwhile friends have become even more erst. But Miz Susan won't let me and maybe that's for the best.

One of the departed who still gets cards here (as well as investment advice) is apparently alive and well to the point of having run for a Ramsey County office this past election season. A few of his lawn signs popped up in the front yards of some of the neighbors so he must have been an OK guy. I didn't vote for him. We tend to stick to straight party line voting and this guy didn't show up on my sample ballot. Our candidate actually won which seems like a rarity some years. That was enough to bind the wounds of not getting to live in the local version of the George-Washington-slept-here house.

A couple of years ago, we opened a card addressed to some long-gone tenant and discovered a Christmas letter which caught Miz Susan's fancy. It was a Christmas ABC letter and the damn thing ate at her for a couple of years before she finally gave up on trying to shame me into concocting one. She cranked one out during the uneventful hours of her jury duty stint. She did a considerably better than average job, better than I ever could have. She's a sucker for kids' illustrated ABC books so maybe there was some creative longing that finally found an outlet. Except for filling in the letter "F" which she'd forgotten (and what was that about?), I could only come up with a few minor tweaks and edits to make it production ready. We sent it out tucked in some 30 year old holiday cards that I'd probably bought home from the Hamline Bookstore in about 1988. No one's complained yet and we haven't had the postal inspectors at our door telling us to quit wasting the mail carriers' time with junk like that so I'm going to call it a success. If any of you missed out on this thing just let us know and we'll get one headed your way.

I don't usually feel sorry for our mail carrier. He sometimes gets the mail delivered to us before dark and he liked our cat Miles but other than that we're not all that crazy about him. We had a great carrier when we moved in but he didn't last the year before the geniuses downtown pulled him off his long-time route and turned our block over to a cast of characters which can only be described as a mixed bag. The nearest to regular guy hates to take advantage of the opportunity available to him for wholesome outdoor exercise and will tromp across our front and through Miz Susan's gardens shamelessly. About the only good thing to come from all the snow this winter is that it's piled so high next to our walk that he can't trailblaze his own shortcut and is forced to take the long way around to the next door neigbors.

About the most bizarre card we got this year was the one that showed up (after Santa's big day) from Linda and Laird Hanson of Hamline royalty fame. This card always sends Miz Susan into a seethe for a couple of hours and even I'm perplexed as to how I've stayed on that mailing list. I hate to think it, but maybe Linda doesn't realize that I still get the card or even remember who I am (or was). This year's version was particularly smarmy with L and L surrounded by a group of purported Hamline students who might have come straight from the Multicultural Modeling Agency. Mainly, I wonder why it was late in arriving. Probably the stress of the all-by-her-lonesome keeping Hamline propped up in the face of all the nay-sayers prevented her from getting to her cards as soon as she'd have liked. Hey, it's nice to still be counted among the inner circle. And it fills the void of not getting a card from the President out at North hennepin.