We have a little holiday ritual in our house. On the first weekend of December or the last in November, Barenaked for the Holidays gets cranked up on the speakers, we warm up a bottle of mulled wine and sit down at my great-grandmother's dining room table (more about its provenance and interesting lifetime in another post) to write holiday cards. Two sets of cards with two sets of messages, and wishes inside for a wonderful holiday season.
As holiday cards are traded across the oceans, we always love stumbling across a new batch of cards through our letterbox (I'm turning into a Brit, forgive me please). My good friend, who sang at our wedding and is an extremely talented opera singer sent us a lovely card in 2006 which got lost in the post somewhere between Germany and Ireland, where we were living at the time. She was offered a contract with an opera company in Lisbon shortly after and two years later, she went back to visit Germany where a friend of hers had been collecting her mail. Lo and behold, our formerly lost card had been sent back by An Post (the Irish postal service) nearly two years later. I know this isn't an extreme case of lost post, but seriously. Two years?
The explanation (as far as I can tell off the photo), is that they first believed it to be an insufficient address. Hmm. That was the address our bank bills came to, our electricity, and a bunch of other mail (including holiday cards) - so maybe it was insufficient en route rather than in Ireland. On the 2nd of July, 2008 (18 months after it was sent) - An Post finally stamped it as "Not At This Address" and sent it back on its merry way to Köln. If you look at the blue stamp closely, it seems as if the mail somehow even made a detour to a French speaking country at some point (even though the postage stamp is German), with a bilingual tick box option. I want to make a joke about efficiency and Ireland here, but it most likely spent 2007 and half of 2008 lying neglected, screaming out for someone to please pick it up and rescue it from the postal sorting floor in Dublin 14 (or if it was lucky, the GPO).
Maybe this year we'll start a new tradition - e-cards. Credit crunch friendly and efficient, all rolled into one.
