Dear Friends....

You will not be receiving Christmas cards from us this year. We aren't mad at anybody. We aren't protesting anything. We aren't broke. We aren't devoid of Christmas cheer or bah-humbugging anything. We have (had) plenty of time to get them addressed and in the mail.

We have a supply of pretty Christmas cards, because I can never resist buying them on sale after Christmas. We even have some of those that are designed to put a photograph in, and I had planned to have someone take our picture with us on our motorcycles and wearing Santa hats. (Not sure how I was going to get hubby to agree to that last one, but I certainly was planning to do it.)

So it's not a lack of planning that has rendered your mailbox empty of our Christmas greetings. We live only a few miles from the tiny post office in Bethlehem, Georgia, where people mail their cards from all over the country every year so they can be postmarked from Bethlehem. I usually stand in line to stamp them myself. It's not that I don't have time to do so.

I'm not even going to claim that addressing the cards hurts my (I think) arthritic hand. I have a file with the addresses for our Christmas cards on the computer, and I usually just print out the labels and stick them on the envelopes. I do, however, sign the cards myself. I'm not TOTALLY impersonal.

I'm not even justifying my non-Christmas-card-sendingness by saying I'm thinking of the environment and all the trees that went into making those cards and stamps and labels.

I just don't want to.