History of The Scallion: Part 1

I love Christmas cards. I like sending them. I like receiving them. I have a lot of family. I have a lot of friends. I send out a lot of Christmas cards, and I have been doing it since what seems like the dawn of time (but hasn't really).

It has been since the dawn of computers, however, so for years, we did everything by hand: the address on the front, the return address, the signature. This wouldn't have been so bad—even for a lot of cards—but I also liked writing a little something in each card. Mostly it was just something about our year, and let's face it, we don't do a lot, so it wasn't a lot of writing, but over the course of 50 to 75 cards, it adds up. Now, if we saw the person in the preceding year, I might put in an additional tidbit about that person. I also looked at the previous year's Christmas cards (because yes, I keep them), and when people would write something to me, I would respond to their comments. (How is your mom? Did you get the basement fixed up? I hope your dog isn't still chewing your slippers.)

As you can imagine, this ended up taking a lot of time. And every year, there would be a few more cards to write so it would take even longer. So I began to dread this chore—the destination of which I loved (Christmas cards sent), but the journey of which I did not.

As technology improved, we automated it a little—we used preprinted return address labels, for example. But we resisted the idea of printing mailing labels and having the cards preprinted with our signature (I mean, come on, "Love, Loves" is much cuter when it is handwritten), so we still weren't saving a lot of time.

Over the years, we got our share of holiday letters. (Aside #1: Don't get all up in my grill because I call them holiday letters—we celebrate Christmas, but not all of our friends do. To avoid calling them Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Festivus/Solstice letters, I'm using the generic "holiday.") And we resisted the urge to produce one ourselves for a long time. Let's face it: they're not all good, and we didn't want to end up on the trash heap. But the idea kept swimming around in the back of my head. So we talked about it and decided that if we made it kind of funny and short (no more than one page), maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

Fast forward to Thanksgiving 1999. I sat down at my trusty, state-of-the-art IBM PS/2 to start typing our first holiday letter. (Aside #2: Our IBM PS/2 had a 20 MB hard drive and a 1200 baud modem. I used WordPerfect to type the letter and an Epson dot matrix printer to print it out. And then we went to a copier center to make copies. Young people: You will not know what any of this means. I might as well tell you we played records while we wrote our holiday letter. Old people: You can continue reading when you stop laughing.)

Anyway, I was staring at a blank screen and couldn't think of anything to write. I asked Vic, "Do you remember anything we did this year?" And he said, "Well, in January ...," and thus a holiday letter was born.

1999 Holiday Letter

The letter was ready to go, lickety-split. Yet I couldn't help thinking it was still a little impersonal. So I decided to write a little personal message on the back of every letter. "How long can that take?" I thought. Well let me tell you, it took a L-O-N-G time.

And that's where our next blog post will pick up.

(Aside #3: Don't judge any typos you find in this letter. I wasn't working as an editor then, I had a 1200 baud modem so my it would have taken an hour just to look up how to spell "Kwanzaa," and I'm too lazy to proofread and correct them now. OK, you can judge me for being lazy.)