Christmas Connections

We sent out 423 Christmas cards this year.  Over the years, we have refined the process to make it manageable, and I have the entire procedure written out since we only do it once a year.  Some of you getting this newsletter have probably received our card and letter in the mail.

Part of the procedure is going through the Excel spreadsheet I use to keep the names and addresses for the MailMerge operation to create mailing labels.  We write corrections to the printed list during the year.  Sometimes people are removed, mostly because they’ve died, or maybe we’ve lost touch.  But typically there are new names we add.  These are new friends we made during the year.

Looking at all the names, I got to thinking about how each of them ended up there.  There are some obvious categories, like family.  You don’t get to choose your family, but for most of us, they include the people that have been in our life the longest.  If you’re married, or have a sibling that got married, you got to pick up some additional family.

As we leave the home to go to school, we pick up new friends.  I have very few friends from my school years that I’m in touch with.. heck, I didn’t have that many friends when I was IN school.  But there are a few from high school and college that get Christmas cards.  Francie, in contrast, has MANY friends from this category.

After school we go to work and often raise kids, which is another source of friends.  I’m still in touch with people I worked with when I started Pacific Rim Engineering in 1985, and most recently when I retired from the City of Carlsbad in 2017.  Actually of course, I have friends from my current part time job as a dishwasher at Sparrow Bakery.  Francie of course has many friends from her work years, and also associations from the 20+ years of raising the boys.

Besides working my entire career as a civil engineer, accidentally starting Gossamer Gear along the way has been a HUGE source of friends, mostly in the hiking community, some of which have found their way onto the Christmas card list.

For some of us church, or another social or professional organization is a source of friends over the years.  There are several people on our list that we’ve spent years in small groups, discussing the sermon and sharing the triumphs and hardships of our lives.  I meet with a bunch of guys at 6 a.m. every Wednesday (when we’re in town) for study and prayer, and they get cards.

There have been people on the list at times who were friends of friends, even after our original friends dropped off the list.  Sometimes friends of friends can lead to concentric circles of friends, like my friendship with John Mackey, which has led to becoming connected with many of his friends. And I often connect friends of mine who I think should know each other or would enjoy meeting.

It’s fun to incorporate some of the people who you deal with on a regular basis as friends.  I wrote about this applied to health care professionals.  I have shared sourdough starter and recipes with an attorney I hired for some contracts work. Sometimes you click with someone, find common interests, and develop a friendship that extends outside of the original relationship.  I did some speaking this year for a firm whose founders stated “We want our friends to be clients and our clients to be friends.”  I love it when circles in life overlap.

Publishing take less. do more. in 2024 has led to many new friends being added to the list.  Some of the people that I worked with in producing and promoting the book have become friends.  Many times when I was on a podcast promoting the book, I really connected with the host.  I’ve hiked this year with several podcast host friends, got to meet them when traveling, even had them stay with us in Bend.  The book also led to speaking engagements, and we’ve ended up with new friends from those.

Then there’s the random-talking-to-strangers category.  As an introvert, I’m much happier NOT talking to people.  But I have found that when I make the effort, sometimes great connections result.  We have friends that we (okay, Francie) chatted up when we were standing in line at the Bend Film Festival. I added Azure to the list after meeting her in Emigrant Wilderness and striking up a friendship.  Talking to Kirby as we waited for a flight back to Bend resulted in another friendship with her and her dad.  Anna actually reached out to me after reading my review of John Mackey’s book The Whole Journey.  We met a couple of new friends while kayaking, as I wrote about in an earlier blog post.

With rising levels of loneliness, maybe it’s time to, once in a while, be curious and talk to strangers, or converse more intently with people we interact with on a business level.  And then when we end up with a new friend, make the effort to stay in touch, by phone, and maybe with a Christmas card. Go ahead and talk to that person in line next to you… you just never know where it will lead.