Costco Halloween Candy and Extra Glitter on the Christmas Cards, Please
Ordinary Tuesdays
Observations from everyday life. The small moments, familiar places, chance conversations, and ordinary experiences that quietly reveal something larger.
Well, it’s August. And I’m sitting here eating Halloween candy from Costco. Yes, the mini chocolate bars; not that candy corn crap. And that’s not even the weird part – sad, yes; weird, no.
The weird part is that on the weekend, I spent 40 minutes at Indigo perusing the new Christmas cards. My internal debate wasn’t that it’s too early for Halloween…let alone Christmas. No. My personal conundrum was whether to choose cards with glitter or without.
I realize that many people no longer send Christmas cards. I’m not one of them, at least not always. While at Indigo, a twenty-something woman said, “No one goes to the trouble of sending Christmas cards anymore.” She’s not wrong; we receive fewer and fewer every year. However, my Auntie Mary is 102 and never misses a year.
But the phrase, “No one goes to the trouble of sending Christmas cards anymore,” stuck with me all weekend, not unlike the Halloween caramel in my teeth.
“Goes to the trouble”
That’s such an interesting turn of phrase. We all use that expression. Oh, she goes to the trouble of making lasagne from scratch. Wow, he went to the trouble of picking them up at the airport. They went to the trouble of buying local.
And of course there’s the opposite – I couldn’t be bothered. I admit that is frequently my default on many days. Just because I’m retired doesn’t mean I’m not still lazy!
But somewhere along the way, we seem to have decided that the effort itself says something too. Perhaps sometimes as much as the message. Damn it, Marshal McLuhan was right.
I’ve been sending handwritten notes for decades. At least one a month, generally. I never really thought about why. I just like doing it.
Apparently, “going to the trouble” might just be signaling more than my love of fountain pens and quality stationery.
We worked our way through the era of increasingly frictionless communication. What started for me/many of us as typewriters with ribbons and phones with pigtail cords attached to the wall has morphed my communication to a single three-ounce device in my pocket. That device lets us simultaneously watch a movie while sending an instant message wishing someone a Merry Christmas…anywhere in the world. And now, even space.
Frictionless equates to effortlessness.
That’s when I realized that 20-something woman at Indigo wasn’t judging me for still sending Christmas cards; she was probably lamenting not receiving any.
Perhaps it’s not just us that’s nostalgic?
So do they miss something they never had? Or do they miss something else? Do they miss someone “going to the trouble” for them?
If McLuhan was right, then the inefficiency of a handwritten holiday card with extra glitter is signaling more than Merry Christmas.
But by this point in my thinking process, I’ve had a tremendous amount of Halloween sugar, and I realize that “inefficiency” is really more like “intentional” or “on purpose”. So that means “going to the trouble” is code for making the effort to signal that we care.
Related Reading
If you enjoy following ordinary observations that turn into bigger questions, you might also like:
- Old School Hobbies
- The Last Analog Generation
- The Extinction of the Ironing Board
- Happy Retirement: Why the Greeting Card Isn’t the Entire Story
Research Note
The observations in this article are informed by ongoing reading and research in psychology, sociology, adult development, aging, friendship, purpose, identity, and life transitions. While these essays are observational rather than academic, many of the underlying ideas are grounded in established research.
- Marshall McLuhan — “The medium is the message.”
- IKEA Effect research — Norton, Mochon & Ariely
- Handwritten Thank-You Notes and Fundraising — Experimental Economics
Cynthia Ross Tustin is the founder of I'm Thinking of Retiring, an online publication exploring the psychology, purpose, and everyday realities of life after work. A retired Fire Chief, former ICU and Emergency Room nurse, instructor, and policy writer, she combines lived experience, research, and a lifelong curiosity about human behaviour to write thoughtful essays on retirement, identity, purpose, friendship, and the ordinary moments that quietly reveal something larger. Through her Retirement Field Notes and Ordinary Tuesday series, she encourages readers to approach this next chapter with curiosity rather than certainty.
