Few Christmas Cards

 

We used to send out and receive about 60 Christmas cards, and, this year, we sent out about 25 cards or so, and we likely got back about 15 cards.

 

This Yuletide season, several relatives on both sides announced that they would wish everyone a Merry Christmas on Facebook, a global kind of salutation, but that this was their notification to relatives that no more Christmas cards would be sent out, going forward. These are families that we have exchanged cards with for over 20 years.

 

We thought that this change was significant, sad, and tragic: another tradition is dying. People need some connection to community, family and old rituals and practices, to fight loneliness, to capture meaning in their lives, and to find some stability and continuity in a fast-changing world.

 

When sending out a Christmas Card once a year via federal mail is an inconvenience, that seems to me like a culture in decline somehow. I do not know exactly what it signifies, or how to solve it, but I have a general theory that we should live in the present; we should planning improvement for our self-development in the future, all the while tying ourselves to history and the past, so that we do not lose an objective, long-viewed perspective.

 

Speaking only for myself, I am an egoism moralist, which I enthusiastically advocate as a change society needs to adopt. But should it catch hold, and it eventually will (perhaps blended with altruist morality in many places), it would constitute a radical, dramatic break with Western moral and cultural traditions.

 

I actually believe that this monumental ethical change away from destructive, traditional Western altruist morality is of immense value to society if humans are to survive and thrive going forward.

 

In many important ways, I am not a traditionalist, and yet I bemoan the fact that another old-time American tradition of sending out mailed Christmas cards is dying out.

 

At first glance, these views seem inconsistent, if not contradictory or hypocritical. So it might It may be, due to my ethical radicalism, that I have zero right to whine about the loss of family or communal rituals—like gathering with family on holidays, or exchanging Christmas cards with family, friends and neighbors—but, I can only soften this criticism by offering that even a society of individualists and individuators require community, family, companionship, rituals and the comforts of tradition to feel somewhat cared for in this vast, cold universe.