Special Delivery : Former Nun Sets Up an Outdoor Greeting Card and Mailing Service for Skid Row Residents

From Skid Row, Los Angeles, with love, the Christmas cards have gone out to homes from Brooklyn, N.Y., to Hannibal, Mo., to Guadalajara, Mexico.

Typically, they are signed, “Your son.”

And, often, there is no return address.

“They wanted their families to know they were OK, but a lot of them said, ‘I don’t want people to know where I am,’ ” said Catherine Morris, who for the last three weeks has been giving away cards from a table set up on a street corner in the heart of Skid Row.

By today, Christmas Day, she figured she would have given away 1,000 cards--old-fashioned cards, Garfield cards, funny cards, religious cards.

For those who did not have the 25 cents postage, she stamped and mailed the greetings.

Morris, a former nun, is a member of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker community; most of the customers at her card station at 6th and Towne streets were residents of Skid Row hotels, missions and shelters, and homeless street people who line up on that block each Monday, Wednesday and Saturday mornings to get a free meal from the Catholic Workers.

“Hi, Catherine!” they greeted her, as they came through the food line on a recent morning, carrying paper plates with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on hamburger buns and a slaw salad. Each of these mornings, there is food enough for 600 people. When it is gone, the workers close up shop.

The Christmas card project evolved quite by accident.

Just before Christmas, 1988, Morris was rummaging around in the basement of the Catholic Worker community’s building when she came across “this huge stack of cards. I guess someone had bought them at an after-Christmas sale.”

Now, this is an organization that relies solely on donations, and Morris isn’t one to waste anything, so she put the cards out at the group’s medical clinic with a little sign: “If you’d like to send a Christmas card, I’ll mail it for you.”

She found out in a hurry that people down on their luck aren’t necessarily ready to cast off tradition. The cards went quickly.

So, last January, thinking about Christmas, 1989, she placed an announcement in the Catholic Worker’s newspaper, the Agitator; “thousands” of new Christmas cards poured in, she said. “We didn’t know how to turn it off.”

Suddenly, it had become her project, along with her regular duties as one of nine members of the Catholic Worker community--which includes her husband, Jeff Dietrich--who live communally in a Victorian house in Boyle Heights. All pitch in to prepare and serve food for the needy and help manage the medical clinic.

After 16 years on Skid Row, Morris, 55, a white-haired Santa’s helper in T-shirt and blue jeans, is both kind and street-wise. She placed no firm limit on the number of free Christmas cards one person could have. But, she said, “If someone said they wanted 20, I figured they were going to be sold on the street.”

Sometimes, people would tell her, “I have no one to send one to.”

Morris would smile and say, “You can send one to me.”

A few did. “It’s been very touching,” she said.

Armed with a ZIP code directory, she would finish incomplete addresses. Blessed with a keen memory, she did a favor for a rather confused man who sent two cards, each signed “Your son,” to the same person.

“I held one back for 10 days,” Morris said, “so it wouldn’t look like confusion, but caring.”

Some of the card-senders lingered over the Garfields--a popular item--but settled on cards with a Nativity scene, explaining, “My mother’s religious.” Only a few, perhaps a dozen, asked for help because they could neither read nor write.

“A lot of cards went to the South,” Morris said, and “a lot of cards went to ‘Grandma’ and people without last names.” Many were addressed to friends right on Skid Row, to be delivered by hand, much like a grade-school Valentine.

For some, the act of sending a Christmas card was a way of reaching out to family members they hadn’t seen in years, when their circumstances were very different.

Morris listened to their stories, but asked no questions. “There are a lot of people who are on the outside,” she said. “There was the sense that they wanted to be touching back in but didn’t know how to do that.”

The card project appears to be a tradition in the making.

Yes, Morris said, they’ll probably be giving away cards on the street again next year.

The smiles on the men’s faces as they handed back the carefully penned cards for mailing was Morris’ reward.

Working on Skid Row is the kind of hands-on help for the less fortunate that she committed to when she left the Sisters of the Holy Child and a comfortable parochial school classroom in 1974 for a more radical life style.

A week or so before Christmas, a man came by Morris’ table to say hello.

Earlier in the month, she’d mailed a card for him.

He smiled and said, “My mother said to thank you.”