I have a sweet little cousin on the trembling, angst-ridden edge of puberty, and my sister had come up with what she thought was a fantastic idea for a holiday gift: a journal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“See, when I was her age,” my sister told us excitedly, “I’d write a little message in my journal, and then give it to my best friends.\u00a0 They’d write a reply or their thoughts, and then give it back.\u00a0 We’d just pass it back and forth between one another!”<\/p>\n
My fiancee laughed and said, “isnt’ that what little girls are calling ‘Facebook’ these days?”\u00a0\u00a0She’s right, you know: some of us might be able to understand the purpose of a pen and paper, but my little cousin surely woudn’t.\u00a0 And I think she’s missing something.<\/p>\n
A\u00a0few years ago at Christmas, I came across an old box in the garage and rifled through\u00a0its contents to find an old letter\u00a0from my grandpa to my grandma.\u00a0 Both of them are gone now – as a matter\u00a0of fact, my grandpa\u00a0passed away when I was only 2\u00a0– and\u00a0reading the letter was a wonderful and surprising treat.\u00a0 His wit and charm, his warmth,\u00a0shined\u00a0easily through the yellowing, crinkly paper.\u00a0\u00a0I’d never realized how much\u00a0my Mom’s handwriting had looked like his.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
As grateful as I was for the “Happy Thanksgiving” messages I got on Facebook this year, or the many singing photoshopped-head elf Christmas e-cards I expect to get\u00a0in the coming weeks, the cards I treasure most come from the 1970s and 80s when I was a kid and our family and friends would send them via (gasp!) snail mail.\u00a0 And there’s a practical reason I like these cards: I can put them on the windowsills or the mantle.\u00a0 And my grandfather’s note can be passed around among his great-grandchildren who never knew him.\u00a0 What on Earth is my cousin going to do with her page of Facebook greetings 20 years from now?<\/p>\n
As ironic as it is for me to be writing this in a weblog – which, after all, is just a journal that I’m passing around to all of you to\u00a0read if you wish – don’t forget to write this holiday season.\u00a0 Let’s not lose all our books to Kindle, all our cards to jibjab.com, all our sentimentality to e-mail.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If the pen is mightier than the sword, it stands to reason it ought to be mightier than the microprocessor as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have a sweet little cousin on the trembling, angst-ridden edge of puberty, and my sister had come up with what she thought was a fantastic idea for a holiday gift: a journal.\u00a0 “See, when I was her age,” my sister told us excitedly, “I’d write a little message in my journal, and then give […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":441,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/441"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1974"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1976,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1974\/revisions\/1976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}