The Bittersweet Joys of Holiday Greetings

This holiday season I will hear, as all of us do, from Christmas card friends: people we were once close to who now live in distant places, and for whom we still retain a warm spot in our hearts. For me they have included a college roommate, a Navy buddy, a former neighbor, an old girlfriend--friends I acquired at various times in my life, no longer see, never even expect to see, might phone if chance took me to their town, but mainly keep in contact by the annual exchange of holiday cards.

Through those cards my friends and I have shared the passage of time through our lives and the events time produces: marrying, having children, changing jobs, taking trips abroad, suffering and recovering from illnesses--in short, the joys and sorrows, triumphs and traumas of living the same span of years. When the cards take the form of Christmas letters, I learn more about family details than I care to know. When they enclose photos, I see my friends growing older.

But in my mind’s eye they remain as I knew them years ago: the college roommate who slept with his eyes open, so when a dorm resident saw him lying on his bed, he started talking to him without realizing he was asleep; the Navy buddy with whom I served countless night watches at sea, while off the fantail our battleship churned the waters of the Pacific into phosphorescence; the neighbor I tried to bluff in wild Friday night poker games; the old girlfriend--ah, the lovely girl of my youthful dreams.

Occasionally, I would vaguely recollect I had not heard from a friend that season, or my own card would be returned with the post office-stamped inscription, “Moved--Left No Address.” That was always a cause for concern.

Now that I am in my mid-70s, that concern more and more frequently proves justified. The wife of my Navy friend sends back a letter: “It is with great sadness that I inform you that I lost my beloved Edward this summer.” The son of a former neighbor writes: “My Dad, your friend Axel, died last January.” An unfamiliar lawyer, on his firm’s stationary, writes: “As executor of the estate of Ann M., I have the duty to relate that Mrs. M. died on June 27.” After the spasm of sorrow subsides, I realize that I would never have learned this news but for the Christmas card tradition. My pleasure in sending my cards this season is mixed with concern: What messages will I get back?

The death of my peers, of course, emphasizes my own mortality. My obituary in the Hartford Courant is not likely to be seen beyond Connecticut. Some holiday season in the indefinite future, a far-off friend will send his usual greeting, and my wife will reply, “I regret to . . . .” He will say to himself, “Good old Bob. I never would have known.”

While at sea during World War II, I read an essay by the English author E.M. Forster that touched me deeply, and to which I have often returned. Collected in a book entitled “I Believe,” the essay gently expresses Forster’s abiding faith in friendship--in friendship, above all, with people he admired most: “The sensitive, the considerate, the plucky .... They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke.” To convey the feeling of kinship among such people, Forster employed the metaphor of single lights scattered on a dark beach, “reassuring one another, signaling into the night, ‘Well, at all events, I’m still here. How are you?’J”

Christmas cards are like those lights, blinking out that same message across the years. And when one flickers out, the darkness deepens.