I’m nearly halfway through addressing my Christmas cards. Two boxes down, two boxes to go. My rough count stood at 60. I don’t get that many cards in return. The custom seems to have fallen out of favor. Every once in a while, I think I should mark down who sends me a card and then respond in kind. But that seems a little too transactional and seems to miss the point of sending cards. To me it’s all about letting people know you’re thinking about them during the holiday season and no reply is required.

Besides, it’s a nice way to run through your list of friends and relatives and remember them and make note of who you’ve seen and who you might need to see or wonder why you never see them. My wife, when she was alive, carefully logged the year each person got a card, and it’s easy to see who got cut off the list. A year just stopped appearing. I usually knew why, but sometimes not. I’m running the same scheme. You get a card. I write the year. The somber bit is noting who passed or who divorced or who remarried.

One thing I ought to do is identify various cousins, and aunts, and uncles. Lots of the names are my wife’s relatives and I doubt my kids know who they are, but I like keeping up with them. They were a big part of my youth, and even if I didn’t know them personally the names still floated around in conversations and so I knew of them. I guess if you’d like to be remembered it’s probably a good idea to try remembering people yourself. Of course, when I’m gone, I’ll have no idea how it worked out because I’ll be gone. And now that feels overly complicated. I’m just going to send cards because I like doing it and it keeps me in touch with my past.

John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver's Tale