Pity it won't last.

Two-thirds of the family gathered in Charlotte. JJ from Chicago, Tray from NJ. Sarah and Derrick warm and cozy in Fla. Through the miracle of technology we shared a holiday toast and the traditional familial bickering and gibes. Just like old times.

Too late to bed the night before, up too early Christmas morning, church (with Arab priest who gave a blissfully short, entertaining and inspiring sermon), the ritual search for an open store, presents, egg nog, brunch, wine, turkey, trimmings, more wine, clean up, exhaustion, more clean up, nodding in front of the TV (NFL this year!), acceptance, bed.

It really is the same, pathetic old routine, year on weary year. And it never gets old.

And goes by so fast.

And takes so long to come back around.

The practice of mailing Christmas cards to friends and loved ones was conceived in 1843. The business caught on but was taken over, for a brief while, around the start of the twentieth century by the penny postcard. These remained the default mailed Christmas greetings medium for a little more than a decade, and then people went back to cards enclosed in envelopes.

As noted in an earlier write-up, postcards were an early form of social networking (websitesammy.com/2014). The postcard phenomenon was considered primarily a rural event, but my mother's effects make clear that their use was common in New York. They were cheap and mail was delivered multiple times a day including, evidently, on holidays. I am in possession of a large pile of them, received between between 1908 and 1915 by the Sweeney clan.

Three cards shown below all are postmarked 12/25/1908, presumably mailed and received on that date. All were sent to the same address: 33 Madison St. in lower Manhattan. (The building still stands.) All were written in the same hand.

The cards were most probably bought as a set: same manufacturer (German), some graphic theme, same model, same tag line. All three carried identical Christmas greetings, from Grace and Frank, to Aunt Lizzy, Aunt Nellie and Grandma Sweeney. Both the senders and the receivers all lived at the same address.

Grace and Frank assuredly were not the authors. Grace Doonan had been born in 1905, her brother Frank a year later.

The cards were penned, one surmises, by their mother, Margaret Doonan, (nee Sweeney) to her sisters and her mother as a holiday greeting from her very young children. Her penmanship is remarkably close to that of my mother's. And my wife's.

These cards come as personally close as I've ever gotten to my maternal grandmother, who died in 1918 at age 34 when Grace was 12 and the oldest and only girl of four siblings. Judging from the placement of the stamps, it may well be that my grandmother allowed her three-year-old daughter to help with affixing the postage.

The postage rate for a penny postcard was just that: a penny. It reamained one cent until 1952 (except for briefly during WWI, when it rose to two cents: war time, before they knew what to make of world wars.)

Merry Christmas, ancestors. You live on through these artifacts and in my memory during this most ancient of seasons.

Click to see enlarged images. Picture side of other Christmas postcards (1908-13) from this collection are also displayed.