As I mailed my last Christmas card of the season, I basked in a treasured emotion: feeling virtuous about something I actually enjoy doing. With each friendly message scribbled on bright cardboard I thought of old, distant friends touching that same paper, connecting with me in a way screens cannot do.
Escaping the alienation of the digital world can be as simple as ink and paper. We still buy plenty of paper books. The post office still fills with holiday cards. These physical things have irreplaceable advantages.
Handwriting is reliably real. I recently received a fake Paperless Post email invitation from a friend who had been hacked—the email wanted me to click buttons that would do God-knows-what. Little on the internet seems trustworthy anymore, but the cards Sarah and I open together each afternoon during the holidays are utterly authentic—warm, funny, sad, absurd—human.
Half the fun is the critique. The hilariously boastful Christmas letter. The overused cliché (does Shutterfly legally require people to put pictures of their dogs on the back of the cards?). The kid in the picture who refused to dress up and scowls when everyone else is cheerily beaming in their holiday sweaters.
I started sending cards when my kids were babies, using cardboard frame cards into which I could insert a family photo. When Shutterfly came along, I switched, and at one point I was sending fold-outs that were like booklets documenting our year. Then the kids grew up and I realized they looked the same every year, and that we looked progressively worse. I switched to old-fashioned cards I buy from a cheerful lady in a shop.
I don’t send very many because it takes too long. I pick a different card for each person and insert a different collection of photos (or none) depending on their connection to me. I have cards for Christians and for Jews, for non-religious folk, for fancy East Coast people and for steadfastly unfancy Alaskans. Everyone gets a note written in ink pen. I value tradition, so hardly anyone gets dropped from the list, and hardly anyone is ever added.
When I was young, I had the sense that my mind lived in my body the way a computer program lives in a machine—that the physical self was merely a vessel to carry thoughts around, and the thoughts were the real thing. As society has increasingly adopted that view, outsourcing our thinking to phones and to the cloud, I’ve gradually gone the other way. Now it seems to me that my body makes the decisions and my mind is just along for the ride. The real me is a physical thing; the thoughts it produces are manifestations.
We’re holding onto paper—holding onto Christmas cards, books, artwork, and much else—because we know what’s real and we need it. Physical things help tether us to the people around us, to the earth and our responsibilities, and to our true selves.
It can be as easy as picking up a pen.
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