For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for December 11, 2018

I’ve only recieved one card so far… from my stepmother’s sister’s family in Spokane

I would much rather get an animated card in my E-Mail than to receive a paper card any day. Sticking to the electronic medium is much cheaper and faster to handle this stuff !

These people are all people that Lynn Johnston knew in real life. Four of them were the ones that got Lynn’s career as a cartoonist started:

Murray and Eleanor Enkin are the couple who sponsored Lynn’s first book, David, We’re Pregnant! based on drawings Lynn did for Dr. Murray Enkin, her obstetrician for both her children.

Marj is Marjorie Baskin, Lynn’s co-worker when she worked at McMaster University and also a sponsor of her first book along with her husband Rabbi Bernard Baskin, who married Lynn and her second husband.

Did they write to you, other than a card?

These days paper cards are almost out of style. The ones with music should be a bad memory.

It’s not too late to send a card back to them.

Not to mention the expense!

I bought a bunch of Christmas Cards years ago and I will send them till they are gone. I send eCards for birthdays and other occasions.

I used to never send cards. Never, to anyone … but started a few years ago. For the cost of, what, 50 cents or so, I can let friends and family whom I never see anymore know I still remember and cherish them. I sent 85 cards this year; about 60 or so went out of town, others to people who live here. I’ll receive maybe 30 back, but that’s fine. That’s not my goal.

These are surely recollections of Christmases past…. her current-day strip would be counting the Facebook greetings.

Lynn’s Notes:

All of these names are people I know. Allie Hindmarch was my grade one teacher…it was my way of telling her — again, how much she meant to me.

Save last year’s cards and only send cards to those that sent you cards last year you’re off the hook

At my church, we have a “mailbox” that we use at Christmas time to exchange cards. That thing fills up every week through December even though most of us check and remove our as often as possible. I started doing Christmas cards again when the mailbox was introduced. Before that it had been 20 years or more since I had sent cards to anyone, even family. Now I have half a dozen or so to mail and the rest are at church.

I stopped sending Christmas cards sometime after my mother died back in ’01. I still send e-cards – Christmas, Birthdays, Anniversaries, etc. The cost of mail from Ecuador to friends and family in the States and Europe, precludes use of snail-mail. Admittedly, the number of e-cards has diminished over the years, as well.

I have been reading this comic for at least 30 years. I sure wish Lynn stayed on the original path of the strip. I miss April. How is April doing? How did her adult life turn out? April got cut out right when she was entering her teens. The fun years for comic strips.

I’m just about the only person I know in my age group (under 35) who sends Christmas Cards. I send a few of them to college friends and several to family, but honestly most of them go to the adults I grew up with back home, church members mostly who watched me grow up… My mother tells me that tons of them come up to her at church and tell her how much they enjoy getting my cards and my Christmas Letter, that they love knowing what is going on with me and still ‘watching me grow up’ in a way. I receive a handful from family, but very few from the rest of my list. I think it’s a tradition that will practically fade away in my generation, and youngsters will never pick it up.

Good grief, “e-cards” – hit “delete” and it’s gone as if it’s never been.

Christmas cards were the one physical way that I kept up with relatives. I am loosing the ability to send cards, because I do not have up to date addresses anymore!