Christmas Cards

It's a big year for me and I promise not to bore you with the details of it but I'm cleaning house because I'm too anal to let Slick hire a housekeeper.  He's tried for a couple of years but I don't work (outside the home) and I can't justify the expense since I'm here all the time but I suck at housekeeping so things are kinda always in limbo here and things are halfway clean with the rotation of getting clean instead of all the way clean on the housekeepers day and then gradually messy over the course of the next seven to 14 days.

Soooo I have a board meeting at my house in a week and I was doing pre-cleaning this morning- you may not have to do this at your super clean houses- the pick up that you have to do before the cleaning- the moving of the piles so you can dust under them.

This is when I finally threw out (in the recycle bin, thank you) the eight egg cartons we have been collecting to take back to the farmers market egg people and came across a stack of Christmas cards.

These are not ordinary cards, these are cards lovingly sent from our friends from 2012, that's right, I'm admitting to having cards accessible from 2012.  I then stopped everything I was doing that was productive and looked through them.

One by one.  

Reading the inscriptions and looking at how all of your kids have grown into bigger kids, how we have all even come to have kids!  We were just college kids when we met- or high schoolers even!  And some of us met as newlyweds and some of us in the last few years and yet we've all shared so many fun times and now we live hundreds of miles apart and just a few miles apart and I just wanted you each and every one to know- THANK YOU. 

Thank you for taking the time to capture your family on "film."  Thank you for spending the money to have the cards printed and taking the time to address them and spending the money to mail them.  It's not cheap.  I know.  I was in the stationery business for ten minutes.  My girl Penny Still is.  But is is so worth it.  For the time I spend at the holidays looking at the cards is wonderful, but the time I looked at them this morning was so heart warming.  

It made me feel so loved and happy that I had to stop all of the cleaning frenzy to tell you that I loved you too.