Every year, I come home from the family Christmas hootenanny, sit down, and write a faux Christmas card to send to all my friends via e-mail. I used to buy big stacks of cards, let them rot on the shelf untouched all December, and then send this e-mail to reassure myself that at least I did something.

Every year, I spend about an hour whipping it up. Five minutes on the graphics, and 55 agonizing over how to best tell everyone I know how much I love them in a space roughly 4″ by 6″. (I cannot just say “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year” in the card any more than I could drink my own pee. Even if I decided I was going to try it, I would never get my hands or mouth to cooperate.) I rewrite three paragraphs roughly sixteen times before inevitably going with the lazy “holiday newsletter, but tongue-in-cheek, so that takes the dorky out of it, right?” motif. I finish it up, I read it over, and I send it off.

And every year, right after I mail it, I reread it again and feel like a complete douchebag for sending it out. I cannot even imagine how it must come across. I sent people a note this Thanksgiving just in an attempt to say “I’m thankful to have friends like you,” and one of the recipients described it as “a desperate cry for help.”