Surprise!
I've spent the last few evenings sending out Christmas cards. Some years I print a "newsletter" and in others, I just include a handwritten note. This is a year when I'm doing a shorter, handwritten note, mainly because I just couldn't get it together to type up the longer letter. I have a long list of relatives to send to since my father came from a family of eleven. I've got a shorter list of high school and college friends and writing notes to them has caused a sort of mental exclamation mark. Let me explain. I grew up in a very small town in Nebraska and went to a very small college near Omaha. The summer after I graduated from college, I got married and moved to Pennsylvania. First to the western part of the state and then shortly thereafter to the western suburbs of Philadelphia where I've lived for the past 35 years. So now when I'm writing to those Nebraska friends about my son in Brooklyn and my daughter in DC, I think about how my lif...