Christmas card

Christmas Greetings 2012

For general Christmas greetings and more, visit my Thoughts & Sayings.

I want to depart from travelogues for a few days to focus on my favorite holiday, Christmas.

I love Christmas and its many traditions. The celebration of Jesus Christ’s birth and the trappings of the season hold a special place in my heart. No matter where in the world I live or what cultural events and traditions I observe, Christmas will always be my favorite.

When I was young, I used to draw illustrated Christmas cards for family and friends. In the days before technology made it easier to do graphic design, I spent hours sketching cartoon characters and winter scenes by hand. I haven’t had time in years to sit down and sketch a Yuletide scene — I barely have time nowadays to send out an annual Christmas letter — but I still enjoy looking at cards from Christmases past.

Here are some of them. I hope they make your holidays a little brighter!

Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a joyous holiday season!

M.G. Edwards is a writer of books and stories in the mystery, thriller and science fiction-fantasy genres. He also writes travel adventures. He is author of Kilimanjaro: One Man’s Quest to Go Over the Hill, a non-fiction account of his attempt to summit Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain and a collection of short stories called Real Dreams: Thirty Years of Short Stories. His books are available as an e-book and in print on Amazon.com and other booksellers. He lives in Bangkok, Thailand with his wife Jing and son Alex.

For more books or stories by M.G. Edwards, visit his web site at www.mgedwards.com or his blog, World Adventurers. Contact him at me@mgedwards.com, on Facebook, on Google+, or @m_g_edwards on Twitter.

Christmas Cards

Isn’t Christmas card writing fun? Not! I don’t know a soul who enjoys sitting down and writing a stack of cards and letters for the holidays. Of course you enjoy getting in touch with people you know and love. You also enjoy receiving Christmas cards and letters from them. You might contact people you’ve been meaning to get a hold of all year long. It’s a great excuse to reach out and get in touch with an old friend or acquaintance.

I have to admit though that the actual job of writing cards isn’t much fun. It can be a lot of work. I like writing our annual Christmas letter. I usually write the first draft, and then my wife contributes and edits it. It’s a joint effort. We work well together. I don’t really enjoy the Christmas card assembly process, though. It’s operations management at its finest trying to maximize Christmas card throughput (corny sounding I know, but it’s true). Buy cards, make a list of recipients, write something pithy in the card to show you care, print the Christmas letter, fold, add an occasional family photo, stick in the envelope, seal, recipient address, and stick on the stamp and return address label. Batch processes so you don’t have to do each painstakingly one by one. Drum-rope-buffer. (Read “The Goal” sometime, an excellent story about operations management.) Fun fun fun! If it were only few perhaps, but the list seems to grow longer each year. We had to trim it down a bit this year. The elimination process is a tough one sometimes because you just can’t figure out who not to send a card to…you want to send one to everyone but you just don’t have the time or resolve to send a card to everyone. It seems like every year we send out a lot more cards than we receive. Maybe it’s a dying art. Maybe everyone is resorting to e-cards. Maybe they’re too busy. Maybe we’ve been crossed off their Christmas list. Who knows. This year I have to admit that it isn’t too enjoyable for me with everything I have to do before we leave. There’s a lot of people I want to get in touch with though so the show must go on. We’ll get them out before the fast approaching deadline. If you’re wondering, “If it’s such a chore, why do it?” it’s because we enjoy keeping in touch and letting people know how we’re doing.