A Different Kind of Holiday Card

When I was a little girl, back before I was a Jew or even a Buddhist, I created hand-made Christmas cards out of green and red construction paper with tiny pasted on snow flakes cut from my mother's paper doilies. Merry Christmas was spelled out in silver and gold glitter stuck to unevenly drawn letters in Elmer's glue. Occasionally, there was a personalized illustration of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer with 100 legs in varying colors, or Santa squashing the roof of a house. Smoke issued from the chimney in circular coils, and a happy family stood by the front door waving.

But, yesterday, I became enmeshed in the cyber world of holiday cards on a website called Tiny Prints, which featured a tiny blue elephant logo extolling "big impressions." I scrolled through billions of design possibilities - everything from vintage to modern to artiste. Flat? Folded? Accordion? Able to be used as an ornament? Eventually, the enormity of choice caused me to bellow in anguish for Juan the Gardener.

After I showed him the multiple number of possible options I had saved, he waved his arms above his head and began to pace back and forth across our stone kitchen floor. We narrowed it down to "Jubilant Joy:bright green,"which allowed room for a photo in the middle of the O in JOY.

"So, which picture should we use?" I fretted.


"Any one, I don't care. I'm not really into this whole card thing, but I want you to be happy."


"In that case, let's use the meditating gorilla."


"Perfect."


As he backed toward the door, I said, "Hold on, we're not done."


"We're not?"


"There's the inside of the card."


"Oh, right."


We scrolled through roughly 2,000 pictures until we came upon the batch from our first excursion together out west to Yosemite and the Giant Forest in Sequoia National Park. I remembered how it had felt coming upon my first magnificent seqouiadendron giganteum named General Sherman, the largest known non-clonal tree by volume: 274.9 feet high, 36.5 feet in diameter at it's base. It had completely boggled my mind. I had gazed up its length, dazzled by the sun above, bent backward until my neck ached. It was surreal, orange-hued, the trunk's base like a gigantic mastodon's toe, almost as if it had been constructed by a Star Wars movie crew. 


We had taken pictures, each of us dwarfed by the tree trunk that rose behind us like a gargantuan muscled leg.


"Let's use these," we agreed.


Next, we needed captions beneath the pictures. 


"How about a Holiday Haiku?" I suggested.


"Great idea!" Juan paced and recited aloud, counting syllables on his fingers, while I scribed.


"Ho-ping you survive
with your san-it-y intact
sense of hu-mor too."


"I'm not sure that captures the spirit of the season," I said doubtfully.


"I like it. It's playful," he said.


"Okay." We had been at this for over an hour. "But, we still have a few more caption boxes to fill."


"How about 'hug a tree'?" Juan offered.


"Hug a tree?"


"Why not?"


"Let's recap," I said. "We have a meditating gorilla, then the two of us in front of a Giant Sequoia, a questionable Holiday Haiku, and a random caption about hugging a tree."


"Yeah. I like it."


"Maybe we could write a poem about winter or something and leave out the hug a tree part," I ventured.


Juan went to the bookcase and returned with a book of poems by the 15th century Zen Master Ikkyu, the "fox-crazy" monk, who had scandalized the Buddhist community by falling in love with a blind singer forty years his junior. Ikkyu had enjoyed the sake parlors of the Pleasure Quarters and interspersed his erotic love poems with traditional Zen themes.


"His poems are brilliant," Juan said excitedly. "Listen to this: I try to be a good man but all that comes / of trying is I feel more guilty."


I put my head down.


"Or how about this one: I'm up here in the hills starving myself / but I'll come down for you."


I groaned.


"Okay, here! This one: pine needles inches deep hug the ground / no one lives here. We could change it a bit to snow inches deep hugs the ground."


"And make it we still live here," I suggested. "We'd have to give credit to Ikkyu, though."


"We could say 'after Ikkyu,'" Juan said.


"I think 'with apologies to Ikkyu' is more like it," I said.


"Perfect."


"Should we add 'Blessings' or something?" I asked.


"No, we don't want it to sound religious."


"Absolutely not," I said.

So, here it is:
With love.

(In the long run, we may be better off with crayons, safety scissors, and construction paper.)