Holiday Missives

In our ever-increasingly high-tech world, I tend to be on the low-tech end of many things. I don’t Instagram or Snapchat or Tweet. When I called a friend the other day to get directions en route, his response was an incredulous, “Don’t you have Google Maps?” I still write appointments into a paper daytimer, which sits on my kitchen counter and is in no way synced to my phone and laptop.

This low-tech-ness extends to my method of sending Christmas cards. You won’t find me mail merging from a fancy Excel spreadsheet or printing tidy labels from an organized list. Nope. I still use my trusty spiral-bound address book. Judging by some of the names scribbled within, I’ve had the book a good 20 years. Probably longer.

Sorting out the Christmas card list is always a trip down Memory Lane anyway, a journey enhanced by the physical act of turning the pages of my slightly tattered address book. With an electronic list, updates are made with a few keystrokes as friends move or fall out of touch. My little book, which sits idly by the phone for the rest of the year, reveals names of Christmases past – and many other adventures.

I can see clearly which friends have moved several times, because their old locales are scratched off and rewritten wherever there was room. Sticky notes with other address changes poke out in a multi-colored array from the worn pages. Married friends with changed last names often have two entries – with their original names and their newer ones – and I have to take care not to send multiple cards to these twice-entered pals.

I pause, at least inwardly, often as I address the envelopes, wondering what old friends in Colorado or Massachusetts or across the Atlantic have been up to in the months since we last exchanged Christmas cards, trying to figure out how old children I once babysat are now. (I am always surprised when their family cards arrive and reveal these children I hold in my mind as toddlers or grade schoolers are now driving or attending college.)

Many times I can picture the places where I am sending the cards – the view of Paradise Divide from Crested Butte, the happily cluttered house of my one-time soccer coach in Old Harlow, the craggy shoreline and green-gray sea of the Renvyle Peninsula. As my pen puts numbers and street names onto paper, I recall times spent in these places.

If I were to print labels from an electronic address list, I’d lose that conjuring up of the past, which is the best part of sending cards. My method takes longer and can certainly be a bit disorderly, but I like it anyway.

Some of the names in my address book I’ve not written onto an envelope in many years. There are college buddies with whom I exchanged summer letters long ago, before the dawn of email, when notes were sent from mailbox to mailbox year-round, not only at Christmastime. Their names are still in the book, but their addresses have likely changed many times since we last corresponded.

For years I sent a card to the nervous Irish couple I lodged with during the summer I studied at university in Galway. I no longer send the annual missive to their address on Carbry Road, nor have I received one from them in several Christmases. But that entry in my address book evokes memories of my first journey to Ireland, which I spent seeking some insight into my Irish heritage, struggling to learn an ancient language, and embracing legends and fairytales I’d never heard as a child.

There are other names from that summer, too, mostly people I’ve fallen out of touch with in the 20 years since, but a few who still receive a Christmas card from me each year. There are high school friends within those pages, too, and old soccer teammates, former co-workers and longtime family friends. A few of the names in my book belong to people who have died; as I turn the pages, I remember them, too, and our shared stories. It seems right to have their names still written there.

For many of the people on my Christmas card list, this annual exchange by so-called snail mail is our only correspondence. Others I see often or occasionally. Many pop up on my Facebook feed, so I feel as if I have some sense of the goings-on in their lives, even if we haven’t spoken in years.

Some of their cards come with newsy letters of recent events, both happy and challenging. Others are store-bought cards, hastily signed. Many include photos of growing children, beloved pets, and adventures from the past year. Before I open each envelope, I try to discern the sender from the handwriting or the postmark. I am happy to receive each card, each glimpse into the world of the sender, whether casual acquaintance, favorite cousin, or dear old friend.

Sometimes I receive a card from someone who has moved since their last holiday missive. I tear the return address from the envelope and tuck it into my address book where it joins other similar scraps, old notes and letters I’ve saved, and many treasured memories. All stowed away until next year’s Christmas mailing.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the December 24, 2015 edition of the Littleton Record.

Local Resources

Last weekend Franconia held its annual Old Home Day celebration, which this year feted the 100^th anniversary of the town’s beautiful Abbie Greenleaf Library. Just up the road, Sugar Hill is celebrating 50 years as an incorporated town, with much discussion of its history – as a town reaching the ½ century mark and as a community with families and stories that reach back to the 1700s.

Both events highlight the importance of local resources. Not the natural resources that draw both residents and visitors to this beautiful neck of the woods, but the kind that are more rarely discussed – our libraries and museums, whose stature is small, but whose import to the local community is immeasurable.

These are the places we go when we have questions that cannot be answered via a Google search. They are the places we visit to see how our towns looked 100 years ago, find out who came before us, or discover what grand building once stood at the top of those elaborate but now overgrown stone steps leading seemingly to nowhere.

Libraries offer much more than borrowed books. They are a place to find information of all sorts, to sit quietly and read, and sometimes to access the Internet – a big deal in a place where many folks are still stuck on dial-up connections at home. Larger libraries, like Littleton’s, also have microfilm of local newspapers covering several decades, along with other historical resources. These can be a boon to people conducting research, but they’re also a kick to look through, revealing enticing glimpses into bygone days.

As a resident of Franconia, I often visit the Abbie Greenleaf library, built the same year as Fenway Park. The building is well kept and the gardens out front are a glorious assortment of colorful blooms through the summer. But the real treasure is inside, where the librarians can point you in the direction of well-worn history tomes or the latest reading sensation – or offer a suggestion if you just don’t know what you want.

Likewise, our area’s museums are treasure troves of local history, revealed through photographs, personal notes, and carefully considered exhibits. While searching for one thing or another in our local museums, I have discovered unexpected gems. It is here that I found the glorious Profile House which once reigned in splendor over Franconia Notch. It is here, too, that I gained important insight into the later development of Cannon Mountain as a ski area. And it is here that I learned that as successful a poet as Robert Frost became, he was not much for farming, despite keeping a cow in his Franconia barn.

Over the years, for various stories and projects, I have turned to several local resources – the Franconia Heritage Museum, tucked into a former residence gifted to the town; the Sugar Hill Historical Museum occupying a neat, bright building and adjacent carriage barn in the center of town; the Littleton Historical Society’s museum nestled into the lower level of that town’s Opera House; and the NewEngland Ski Museum, housed in a tiny building and former maintenance shed at the base of Cannon Mountain’s tramway.

These museums range from all volunteer staff to full-time employees. Some are open a few hours during summer weeks, others nearly year-round. All hold information in the form of scrapbooks, photographs, interview transcripts, books and newspaper clippings and little tidbits of information tucked here and there that together paint a picture of our region’s history – its people and commerce and changing landscapes.

Usually, these small museums (and municipal libraries) operate on shoestring budgets. Many rely heavily on meager membership fees from a core of interested supporters to keep the doors open and the bills paid. If you haven’t visited your local library or museum lately, I encourage you to do so – and to support it however you can. You never know what you might discover.

A version of this essay appears in this week’s edition of the Record Littleton.