Dear Reader,

This weekend I got to visit my brother, who lives in a sleepy college town on the other end of the state. To get there, I caught a regional flight. Plane travel is so funny: grumble through security, wait at the gate, find your seat, and then leap straight into the sky. It was raining buckets when I left LA, but my plane quickly punched through the wet, gray clouds, up into the lonely blue. 34,000 feet above sea level. Science fiction stuff.

The other day I saw a contrail by the moon and rushed to grab my phone camera. It looked just like the cover of a novel from the ’60s about settling the stars.

The real magic of my trip wasn’t the mode of transport, though. It was the gift of getting to visit someone I love—and to walk a few days in his world. How special to step, briefly, out of my usual context, and to reflect on things.

I’ve been thinking about reflective practices lately, probably because most evenings for the last week I’ve been working on the family holiday card. As a relatively slow process, making a homespun holiday card leaves plenty of time to think about things. I’ve been loving it—which is why for this letter I decided to write up my thoughts on holiday cards.

Thanks as always for reading.

– Jasper

In Praise of Making a Holiday Card

This year the family holiday card is a little zine: eight pages long, black and white, 3” x 5”, staple bound and slipped into envelopes that are just about ready to be carried down to the post office.

It’s my opinion that more people should make their own homespun holiday cards.

I’ve got plenty of reasons why:

1. You get to meditate on your community: Who will you mail it to? What do you want to say to them?

2. You get to meditate on your own life: What happened this year? What do you care about enough to include?

3. Making things is fun. Sending things through the mail is fun.

4. If you do it year after year, it becomes a ritual: a marker of the passage of time and a way of slowing it down.

5. And of course, I myself would like to receive more special, intimate mail. In this digital age, who wouldn’t?

I designed the zine over the course of about a week. I tried not to overthink it. I just kept making prototypes, adding more pieces, printing out updated copies. I got contributions from my partner and from the kid. I decided it should be full-bleed, which meant trimming each zine on three sides. I tweaked the images so they would print with nice tonality in black and white. I pushed text and images around in InDesign.

Then on Friday night I decided to stop fiddling. I printed out 120 copies of the zine, folded, stapled, and trimmed them, and started stuffing envelopes. All while watching an episode of Shogun and two Tiny Desk Concerts. It was fun, in its way, the repetitive manufacturing process. I got to put some miles on my long-arm stapler and my paper cutter. When my body got sore, I would just think of each little zine winging its way to someone I love.

My grandparents always used to send me cards around the holidays. Grandpa Bob’s cards were short, sometimes funny, sometimes a bit perfunctory. (He had a lot of grandchildren to write to.) Grandma Pat and Grandpa Dick’s cards always had a religious message and a twenty tucked inside. Then there was Grandma Mimi’s ballpoint cursive, the ink embossed ever so slightly into the glossy card stock, her message covering every blank surface on the card. I loved all of these cards, even as I took them a bit for granted.

They stood in contrast to the mass mailing-style cards we always received from a few of my mom’s friends. One would send a collage of pictures from the family vacation to Italy, another sent a staged shot of the parents and children all wearing matching pajamas. These always felt cringe-y to me—or maybe they felt hubristic, the way the card-senders assumed that other people would want to see pictures of their vacations. (This was before Instagram.) But even as I judged them, I loved looking at the pictures. I especially loved how it let me keep up with distant kids around my age, who I might see in person only every couple years.

Still and all, it was a surprise when I turned thirty and realized that I really wanted to send out my own holiday card. It came, I think, mostly out of feeling proud that I had my own little family now. I wanted to both give love to my community, and to show them that I was an adult and standing on my own.

I haven’t been the most consistent in this tradition. In fact last year’s letter got designed and printed but never sent. (We just decided to send the year-old cards out in the same envelope as the new one.) But I’m grateful to have this as a practice. November comes around, and I start feeling itchy: I’ve got a holiday card to pull together. I know it will be a bunch of work. And I know I will regret none of it.

Did you know that mummy brown was one of the favorite paints of the Pre-Raphaelites? Next time you gaze on one of their horny, numinous canvases, just think of how this “rich brown bituminous pigment with good transparency, sitting between burnt umber and raw umber in tint” was “made from the flesh of mummies mixed with white pitch and myrrh.” It only went out of style when “fresh supplies of mummies diminished,” and even then it continued being sold into the mid-20th-century.

I sometimes wonder if there’s a parallel between how 18th and 19th century aristocrats treated mummies (see: mummia) and the cavalier but also quasi-religious way that our elites treat the flammable fluid fossils known as petroleum.

High recommend for the Weird Studies interview with Shannon Taggart where she discusses her investigation into the liminality and spectral persistence of Michael Jackson. I generally love Weird Studies, and this episode is a standout. Here’s Taggart on the strangely shamanic quality of Jackson’s sleep:

I enjoyed the latest Paul Thomas Anderson flick, One Battle After Another, as a piece of entertainment. But I found myself a bit skeptical of its political message, inasmuch as it even had a coherent politics. So I was glad to read this scathing review by Jason England in Defector. I don’t know if I agree with everything in it, but I love a good no-punch-pulled argument against anything suspiciously popular. A sample:

It helps explain what I found missing.

I hope they find Mango!

This GxAce video, “I Visited a Camera Lens Factory and Saw Something I Didn’t Expect” seems clearly to be a piece of sponcon. It’s also a sweet prose poem—a paean to the workers who actually make the lenses ostensibly being reviewed. An interesting artifact, beautifully made.

I’m so glad to have you as a reader. If you’ve enjoyed this email, have you considered forwarding it to a friend?