Now I’m Okay with Christmas Cards and Facebook because they are for my Cousins

I used to hate Christmas cards. I still don’t send them, but that’s because I’m lazy and busy, not because I object to them on principle. I used to think something like “the people I see regularly won’t get anything from a Christmas card that I can’t just say to them in person and that will be more meaningful anyway, and if I don’t see people regularly then what’s the point?” I was young then, though I didn’t think of myself that way at the time (I suppose maybe I’ll someday say that about the me of today as well) and the most important relationships in my life were based on spending a lot of time together on a regular basis. I saw my loved ones and close friends often. I had some other friends I saw rarely, and I wrote them letters. I was once an avid pen-pal. I had some objection - snobbery I would have denied was snobbery - about how it was insincere and inauthentic to buy a car to express a feeling or a connection with someone, plus also something commodity something something capitalism.

I’m older now. I’m married and have kids who I live with. I don’t send my wife or kids Christmas cards. I mean, I don’t send Christmas cards to anyone, but if I did send them I wouldn’t send them to my wife and kids. We see each other in person every day, with few exceptions. Beyond my family, and in part because I have small kids, almost all of the most important relationships I have are with people I don’t see regularly in person. Some them I email and talk on the phone with. Other people I’m much more casual and infrequent contact with via Facebook and Twitter. The young me would have rejected social media as basically inhabiting a Christmas card - inscincere shallow social contact through a product created by a for-profit company. I don’t mind it now though.

There are a lot of people in my life who are basically cousins. I love them a lot and I don’t have much to say on a regular basis so I don’t call or write. When I was younger I didn’t want those kinds of relationships - as a kid my relationships with my actual cousins were different, because I saw my cousins all the time, and as I got to be a young adult I saw them never and didn’t know how to handle that, so I would now say that my relationships with my cousins weren’t what I would now call cousin relationships. I saw this kind of relationship that I’m calling a cousin relationship as deficient because it wasn’t intense enough, it didn’t involve enough regular contact all the time. Now most of my relationships are cousin relationships and I care a lot about those relationships. I want to know that those people are doing well, or if they’re not doing well then I want to know that. I want to be in some kind of ongoing casual contact that keeps them on my mind and lets them know that I think of them – like a Christmas card. So I like the Christmas card quality of social media, for my honorary cousins.