Happy Christmas! Here’s to a time of year to celebrate, to spend with family, and to think about the (adjectives fail me at the moment, so insert your own here) year that was 2020, now in the rearview. To listen to holiday music, like Leslie Odom, Jr. singing Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria. In Latin, even.
It’s also the time of year for Christmas cards. As we looked through our lineup along windowsills, something struck Katie and me. Of all our cards, we noticed only two included any sort of actual handwriting. Of those two, only one was a personal, handwritten note.
Why am I bringing this up? It’s the thought that counts, right? Absolutely.
This made me think, though, of my little box I keep of things from my fifteen-plus years at REI. Yes, it’s a little box. There are only a handful of things I’ve kept, after all. The email from my boss Mike. A hilarious card one of my guys made me after I ordered a Christmas gift for K from Backcountry.com. Two notes, one from Sally Jewell when she was still CEO and one from Matt Hyde when he was our Marketing Sr. VP. The reason I kept them?
They were handwritten.
Both Sally and Matt, all those years ago, carved out a few minutes from their no-doubt crazy-busy schedules, grabbed a pen, and wrote something personal to me in each of them. Almost ten years later, I still have them both. Yes, the thought counts. What counts, even more I remind myself, is taking a little extra time to write something by hand.
