Help your wife with the Christmas cards, my guy

A letter to my past self that might be useful to your present self

Fellas, it’s time to do the Christmas cards again, and I want you on the job.

I write this fully aware that there’s been a lot of discussion of the card-game-that-shall-not-be-named—“Fa*r Pl*y”—on Substack lately, which circles mostly around the idea that men aren’t doing their share at home. I want to be clear that that’s not what this is about. I have no idea what kind of arrangements you all have at home, and you’ll get no over-generalized gender-stereotyped judgment from me. Just a little gender-stereotyped advice.

I want to evangelize for the Christmas card as a thing well worth doing, such that when this season rolls around, you are looking forward to the project, rather than dreading it as I once did. You see, I am a convert to the virtues of the annual well-wishing card. So before I tell you what’s great about Christmas cards, I’m going to tell you my story…

I was a man who hated mailing en masse

It all started nearly ten years ago. I was a newlywed, recently possessed of a beautiful bride, a new home, and a number of generous wedding gifts from friends and kin. But the thrill of this registry windfall was quickly blotted out by a huge, dark cloud of thank-you notes that now needed writing, crackling with static of a thousand social expectations and judgments. My wife and I divided the list, her people and my people, and set about preparing and sending the notes.

I am embarrassed to say that I found this task to be extremely arduous. Because obviously a little note and a few minutes of my time hardly repaid the great generosity of my loved ones. But in fairness, there were hundreds of people to thank, making the aggregate task pretty substantial, and I was a newly-minted junior associate at a law firm, still recovering from taking the bar exam. So I wasn’t exactly thrilled to spend what free time I could find licking envelopes and writing my return address until my fingernails bled.

We eventually did get through the whole list—much too late to be polite—and I resolved that I ought to include a little note in every future wedding gift from me that said “IMPORTANT: Do NOT write a thank-you note for this gift. Save your life force; spend it building an orphanage or something.” My preference at the time would certainly have been mutual gratitude disarmament, on the supposition that the enjoyment people received from a thank-you was almost certainly less than the cost to the sender. (Which I should say is probably true for my disposition as a general rule on both sides of that exchange.)

So imagine my horror when the holiday season rolled around and my brand-new wife announced that we would be sending out a Christmas card.

“No way,” I told her.

“Way,” she said.

“Why should we do this?” I said.

“Why wouldn’t we?” she said.

I was in full lawyer-mode at that time in my life, so I launched into a multi-point persuasive treatise. My arguments included:

1. Nobody cares about Christmas cards.

2. Christmas cards are an old-fashioned thing anyway, not something our generation does.

3. They will undoubtedly be a huge pain.

4. We were both too busy as a pair of young professionals.

She listened carefully to all my excellent arguments and then rendered a fair and balanced decision: we would still be sending out Christmas cards.

Okay, I thought, and I pivoted. I raised the idea of externalities. She and I both went to UChicago, which is obsessed with economics, so I figured this would be a strong rhetorical move.

“Your desire to do Christmas cards creates externalities,” I explained. “You should have to internalize those externalities by being the one to do the Christmas cards yourself.”

She deliberated again, and came back with a counteroffer: she would do half the list—the peoples she knew—and I would do the other half.

“That’s what we would have done anyway!” I protested.

“Right,” she said.

I was not happy about this. But I set about texting every person that I cared about for an address update, I helped write our family update, I ratified her choice of photo and layout, and I stamped and addressed my half of the envelopes.

They turned out nice enough, I thought. I forgot about them promptly and moved on with my life. Until the next year rolled around, and my wife informed me that we would be doing the whole thing again. Only this time, the list was longer, because we had met new people. And in my season of life, my friends were moving around a lot, so I would have to verify all of the addresses again. Devastating.

Thus the Christmas card became an annual source of mild conflict between us: her asking for my help, me asking why we were doing it at all.

All of this is to say: I deeply understand the impulse to do anything but Christmas cards, like building an orphanage or sticking your hand in a cooking toaster.

But! I was wrong. The passing years proved as much to me, and now I’m on #TeamCard in a big way.

Turns out that Christmas cards rule

Here is a brief enumeration of some of the benefits of sending a Christmas card.

1. You’re going to be surprised at how much they mean to people

I thought Christmas cards were just another one of those things that women seem to care a lot about, but don’t really matter,¹ like tablecloths, or laundry (kidding!). It turns out that many people really appreciate getting Christmas cards. I know this now because I hear about it all the time. Some people will text you immediately upon receipt; some will mention it the next time you see them, which may be in August. I have some friends who keep their Christmas cards displayed all year!

This really surprised me, because the Christmas cards we send out aren’t personalized to the recipient. While the aggregate effort is significant for someone with many acquaintances they’d like to keep up with, the effort for any individual one is pretty much bare minimum, so I hadn’t really seen them as particularly meaningful. But a lot of people seem not to feel that way, and I’ve come around to appreciating them more as a recipient myself.

2. They’re an excellent way to maintain strong “weak ties”

I learned in law school about the sociological concept of “interpersonal ties,” which are what they sound like. Specifically, Mark Granovetter has interesting research about how “weak ties” are actually some of our most powerful connections. The idea is that strong ties—say, you and your best friend—probably have networks that largely overlap. But people who you are less strongly connected to probably don’t overlap much, and can thus act as bridges to other networks. So while close relationships certainly matter more for well-being (I assume), acquaintance relationships have their own unique power. For this reason and others, they are well worth maintaining.

Christmas cards are one of the best ways to do this! A yearly note—saying, hey, we may not see each other much, but you’re not forgotten, you matter to me—goes a long way. I don’t recommend doing this specifically with “networking” in mind, but there’s no doubt that if that’s what you’re after, a tasteful holiday card keeps you top of mind, adds a personal touch to an otherwise professional relationship, and makes you look pretty dang good.

3. It’s way better than social media

Sure, you could argue (and I have) that social media does a better job of maintaining weak ties, and more conveniently. But I’ve come to think that it’s just not the same. First of all, we all hate social media by now. Second, when someone shares something on social media, it’s not targeted to anyone; it’s just a Me Blast that you happened to stumble upon. To get a Christmas card, someone had to affirmatively think of you and make the effort to mail you their update. This makes the experience feel extremely different.

4. It’s an awesome family record

Something else I’ve come to appreciate is that a Christmas card becomes a lovely personal keepsake, and if you keep one each year, you’ll soon have a treasured collection that memorializes your experiences over the years. If you do a photo or two and a text update, these become delightful little journal entries as you age and accumulate more of them.

5. Even the annoying logistics are low-key a good yearly practice

It’s actually also a great thing to have to text your friends every year and ask where they live. There are people whose entire message history with me takes place between November 15th and December 10th each year, and the first message of each conversation is “What’s your address?”

We all wish we kept up with our friends better. But if there’s not a great moment or reason to do so today, right now, then there probably won’t be tomorrow, or the day after that. But guess what: the holiday season comes around every year, ready or not. It’s The Occasion. There are so many people who I would probably feel a little awkward just reaching out to out of the blue, but having the excuse to do so every year helps me feel connected with them.

In my view, these are some pretty good benefits! And yes, candidly, it is still a huge pain to get these out every year. But all good things come with some cost, and in this case I’ve weighed them for years, and I can tell you that it’s worth it.

So dudes, send this to your boy who needs to be converted to the cause.

…More realistically: ladies, feel free to forward this to your man. Strategically, I recommend saying that you meant to send him a link about Victor Wembanyama’s latest game but that you got the links mixed up.

Act now, because the goose is getting fat

My pitch for you guys is: Christmas cards rule, so be involved in it. If you don’t do one already, tell your wife you want to do one, then get the ball rolling yourself. If she already does one, consider taking a hand in shaping it so that it really reflects you and can be something you’re proud of.

And NB, this can also be fun, depending on your preferred mode of creativity. My wife is the visual one and prefers to handle the formatting and the photos, which is more than fine by me. But since I like to write, as evidenced by all this *gestures at Substack*, we both prefer if I handle that part. I try to write two or three lines about each person in my family, plus a paragraph or two about our family overall—enough to sink your teeth into, but not a huge letter that people feel like they have to read. Also, it’s absolutely imperative that you start every letter with “20XX was a big year for the _______ family!” I have no idea why—but I’ve never seen a letter that didn’t say this, so I’m afraid to break a secret rule.

At the end of the day, sending a Christmas card creates positive externalities for you and your family, and so it’s only fair that you internalize some of the cost. And look: this is a high-cost piece for me to write, because my wife will use this to get me to be more on top of our Christmas cards—as well she should, is my point.

Anyway, now I need to go write my update for our card this year. 2025 was a big year for the Call family!

1. By “matter,” I of course mean the male version of the term, which means something approximating “absolutely necessary for sustaining life.”