Gary and I started a tradition of giving each other greeting cards when we were first married and continue to do so to this day, 47 years later. We exchange cards for Valentine’s Day, our birthdays, our anniversary, Easter and Christmas – that’s about 470 cards by now! And, as per usual, I kept them.
Now it was time to go through them…to enjoy re-reading them and then recycle them. We don’t want to store them in our new house.
We were home alone on Christmas Eve, so we thought that would be a good time to go through the cards and reminisce. It was a lot of fun looking at all of them… the different style of cards and reading our hand-written notes, if we added any.
Sometimes we gave each other the same card on the same year, and sometimes we gave the same card a year or two later. It was interesting and entertaining.
There are so many b e a u t i f u l cards. It’s hard to give them up, and I did keep a few. I think there are places that collect old cards to create new cards, and I thought about that, but it was overwhelming to think about in the midst of moving.
We also made cards for each other occasionally.
Going through the cards Gary and I gave to each other was a lot of fun, and then I was ready to recycle most of them.
But, it felt different going through all the cards I saved that our sons had made and given to us over the years. We encouraged their creativity and they made some imaginative cards over the years.
We had the good intention to look at them and then recycle them, but I couldn’t do it. We looked at them, and I put them in some semblance of order, and kept most of them… to look at again when we’re even older. And who knows – maybe someday their children will find the cards in a box and enjoy seeing how creative their daddies were.
