Paper, Pen, and Pretty to the Rescue

A long time ago (a really long time ago - like before everyone had a computer in the house) I had a Christmas card list "book". It was just a cheap little thing - a giveaway from a card company. It was far from ideal but it had columns for listing names, street addresses, cities, states, and zip codes. And then it had columns for "sent" and "received". These went out about 10 years, so the book served me well for a long time.

It's probably been over 10 years since that book's last columns were used. Without the sent and received columns the book ceased to be useful. But I didn't worry. I had a computer and I could make a spreadsheet with all the names and addresses and I could even add columns for sent and received. So I did. I can't remember whether I named the file "addresses" or "christmascardlist" or something else that should have been obvious. What I do remember is that I had to open the file at the end of the season to put the Xs in the received column (that practice was short-lived - too much hassle). And then the following year, I couldn't find the file. But I didn't worry, I'd made a print copy. I could recreate the file. So I did. And I repeated this process for a number of years. This year was no exception. It seems that I never actually bothered putting dates on anything and this year I found several files but had no idea which one was the most current. (You would think the file date would have been helpful, but for some unknown reason, all the files had the same date.) There were six different printed versions in my paper file and the only hints I had were the addresses of people who had moved. It looked to me like none of the files was current. This will not happen again.

A visit to the Hallmark store has solved the problem. The pages are laid out with plenty of room for each address, which is important because many of the people on our list these days don't live in the US and addresses in the UK, Australia, France and even Canada take up more lines. There are five years of sent and received boxes AND there are plenty of extra pages so that when the five years are used up, all I need to do is break out another page. I think this will probably do for the rest of my life, or as long as I can remember where I put it.