The Junk Drawer of Christmas Past

I did not send any Christmas cards this year. And, unless I said something that simultaneously offended about 15 people (which is totally possible), neither did many of my friends.

But not to worry, because I still have all of your Christmas cards from last year... and probably the year before. And quite possibly many years before that, if I poke around a bit. Until recently, the ones from last year lived in the top right hand drawer of my desk, where all of the "go to" stuff is supposed to be. The high-use, need-it-now stuff, like, oh, I don't know...STAPLES! or a STAPLER! or a pair of sharp SCISSORS! or a MARKING PEN! I'm shouting these things at you because they seem like ACTION THINGS! Things that are ready to spring into service immediately, poised as they are in the ergonomically located top right hand drawer. But my top right hand drawer is not organized thus.

In my top right hand drawer (which I am opening now) you will find the following: patch kit for inflatable bed (if I spring a leak, it will be ready for duty pronto), a "label blaster" punch-style label maker, an out of date rubber address stamp, a two line phone adapter (one of several I own), shoelaces, ribbon, hand lotion, sunscreen (you can never have too much of that), cough drops (who knows how old those are), a printout from West Maui Tiki Tours, a soft cloth for cleaning my computer screen, last year's calendar, Photoshop's "100 Hot Tips for CS3," a picture of Rusty and Jennifer's kids, with Santa, from last year, a stack of all of your Christmas cards, a postcard my mom sent me from York in 2006, before she came back and found out she had to have a quadruple bypass, birth announcement for Juliana Socoloff, my 1984 AYH membership card with serious looking photo (never know when that's going to come in handy), a postcard of a tongue, my poetry journal from 1982 or so, which I dug up to submit to Cringe, but which didn't make the cut, a very big antique marble, many, many binder clips, a baby's first thank you card from Abbie Duff, a bottle of prescription pills that I took one of and never took another of, a hilarious card from Karen Farley from her ex, Richard Gere, and the Tibetan monks, the picture-hanging kit I was looking for this morning to hang the stockings, two old journals, a bag full of beer caps made into magnets, foam helmet liners, a heavy silver cuff watch I used to love but haven't worn since I stopped working in an office (Damn, this is a big drawer!), a cute container of clips and tacks from The Design Group, three glue sticks, a red stamp pad, a bag of miscellaneous IKEA parts and screws, a giraffe keychain (that is very important), and maybe five other things which I have just run out of the energy to catalog.

But this is not about junk drawers, or why we have them, or why my most-accessible drawer is full of the least usable stuff. This is about your Christmas cards. This year, many of them became gift tags for presents. Very handsome ones, at that. I just cut the fronts into squares, punched a hole, then added a slit for the ribbon to slip into. Voila. And I'm contemplating sending out Thank You postcards, cut from the fronts of these old cards, too. But if I tell you, that will spoil your surprise at receiving a cheap, recycled, late Christmas card from me for New Year's. So shhhhhhh.