An Ammendment to the Christmas Letter

When we lived in Cambridge, while Josh was working at Novartis, he took to raiding the Coca-Cola bottles in the recycling bins of their caps.  He then used the Coke rewards codes printed on the underside of the caps to earn Coke rewards points which could then be redeemed for all kinds of Coke merchandise, magazine subscriptions, and Shutterfly photo gifts.  “Josh, that’s terrible,” I told him, “you want to advance at this company and what if someone finds you digging through the trash.”  His response: “First of all, it’s the recycling, way different from the trash.  Second of all, someone did see me – the head of maintenance – and now he collects all the caps from all of the other floors for me.”  After I received my House Beautiful magazine in the mail, I quieted my skepticism and simply enjoyed.

A few months after we moved to Illinois, Josh received a note from the head of maintenance at Novartis requesting our address.  A week later a giant box stuffed with Coke caps arrived in the mail.  These reward codes have been used exclusively to make cards on Shutterfly, most recently for my mother’s Christmas letter.  As a pre-Christmas gift, I designed, composed, addressed, and ordered all of her Christmas greeting cards for her.  They are darling, but raised a couple of concerns:

“A manse?  What’s a manse?”  my brother demanded.  “A manse, just like a mansion, a small mansion,” I told him.  “You called our house a mansion!?”  (When Hilary and I visited Concord, we drove by Nathanial Hawthorne’s manse, from “Mosses from an Old Manse” and when we asked “what’s a manse,” we were told “a manse, just like a mansion, a small mansion.”  When I looked it up in the ancient dictionary in my parents’ living room, though, I found that a manse is the home of a Presbyterian minister specifically in Scotland.  Oh boy.  To clarify, my brother does not live in a parsonage, but he does have a very nice large house.)

“Read the first three words,” Josh told me, after reading the clever part about my infant daughter learning to ride a horse.  “Born in September, yeah?”  “She was born in August, you remember?”  Oh boy.  Maybe I was just in a September state of mind?  Nope, no way around that one, I’m sorry baby girl. 

While I sulked around the kitchen, saddened by my melting brain and troubled by the talk my daughter’s therapist will someday give me, my sister laughed and told me about her friend who sent out Happy 2012 cards this year.  A very brief Christmas letter emerged in my mind:  “2013, the year in which I joined the good company of mothers who have lost their minds.”