greeting

In 1997 I pen a new year’s greeting slash report and post it to friends. You know the sort of thing—bullet points about what’s happened with your family over the past year. It ends with a salutation for the year ahead.

The recipients are folk you know but don’t see all that often; in fact, some I haven’t seen for 20 years. Since then my new year salutation has evolved, but the list of recipients has not.

Every now and again someone responds. Even rarer is meeting someone I haven’t seen for yonks who tells you how much they enjoy reading my new year greeting. A more regular respondent likes the fact that my kids and I are ordinary people doing ordinary things, with the joys and tribulations we all face all the time. The encapsulation beguiles.

Some years I struggle to find anything worth saying and opt for humour. Once or twice I find nothing good to report, so in time-honoured tradition, say nothing. No greeting, no report.

Over 15 years the new year salutation has become more elaborate. A series of dot points morphs into a PowerPoint presentation replete with photos of the events recorded.

I pull out my last effort—2010. The first slide summarises an uneventful year: no illness, no bushfires, no moving house, no relationship breakdown, no job loss, no bankruptcy. This year has been its powerful opposite, anything but uneventful.

Between me and my good woman, my son and his partner, and my daughter, her partner and their child, we endure relationship failure and atonement; we buy houses, a first for my son, a first in partnership for me and my good woman; we resume old jobs, take on a new job, and look in vain for a job all year.

We attend auctions, a wedding, and travel interstate with a vengeance. And of course, we have a new pregnancy, a second child and grandchild on the way.

So I copy my 2010 greeting and start rewriting it for 2012. I write the text in Word first. Now I must cut and paste the textlets into a PowerPoint presentation, hunt up the photos to go with each entry.

Rock on.