A Christmas without cards

Merry Christmas and a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year for 2025.

In this 2024 Christmas season, we will need to blend some legacy technology, like the telephone, with some information technology like the web and e-mail to do what I have enjoyed doing through the decades: sending a personal thought in my own handwriting to the several dozen people I like to keep greet in this traditional way every year.

In mid-November of 2024, Canada Post workers, including letter carriers, went on strike. As this post is written, in the first week of December, the window of opportunity to rescue the 2024 Christmas cards has just about closed. That’s too bad. But it won’t stop me at least from trying to substitute a few words in my own handwriting on a card sent through the mail with a few minutes of conversation in my own voice over the telephone before Christmas.

Christmas cards were a lot of fun while I was elected. We did an annual special photo shoot and produced our own Christmas cards every year. The visual attraction to the recipients was always our cats, and secondarily Andrea. I seemed to be along for the ride. To my astonishment, numerous people not merely told me, but also showed me, that they collected our cat Christmas cards. As a past photographer myself, I was fussy in how I instructed the photographer to get the pictures from year to year. I wanted the image to be up-close and personal, to make eye contact from the card with the recipient. Even the Toronto Star occasionally featured our Christmas card in their annual round-up of what greetings elected Members of the Legislature distributed.

To this day, more than six years after my last day of service in public life, people still remark on those cards, and ask about the cats. The last of those iconic cats depicted on our cards, Merlin, passed away in January of 2023, just 13 days short of what would have been his 20th birthday. Today, Andrea and I have Kayla, who was born in 2021 and came to us as a ‘rescue cat’ a couple of months after we lost Merlin.

So, if we don’t get to you on the telephone in time for Christmas, and you know our number, simply pick up the phone and call us. Here’s wishing you lots of Christmas cheer, good food and happy times during the Christmas season and into the 2025 New Year.