This, for the record, is a post about Christmas cards.

First of all, there are two kinds of people: the people who divide everything into categories and those who don’t. Sure, you’ve heard it before, but it’s still funny, and it’s still true.

I’m the former, masquerading as the latter. Under this carefree, warm and fuzzy hippie facade you’ll find a heart of … well, science has, in fact, been puzzled by that for decades; it’s a bit like the elusive Giant Squid, only like way elusiver, and if they ever capture it on video I shall immediately post the YouTube, yew betcha.

In any case, I do find myself living in a dichotomous world, and whether or not that is completely subjective or not isn’t a question I bother my pretty (and newly red) head about: after all, if the world IS completely subjective, my take on it is obviously and by definition correct. If it is objective, my take on it is still obviously and by definition correct, and things are made much simpler by the fact that other people are forced to acknowledge this, even sometimes really stupid ones.

Christmas cards. It’s a post about Christmas cards.

There are two kinds of Christmas cards. There are the kind you fall in love with at Granville Island, deep in the heart of the bourgeois yet nonetheless charming West Side. For each of these, you pay approximately the amount I spend on my main meal each day, and for once I am not joking, although it must be admitted that my meals consist primarily of bean thread noodles, chicken stock, and whatever veggies were on sale that day at Sunrise Market.

They look like this:

And then there are the cards that you are just walking down Dunlevy past the Franciscan Sisters of Mercy Bread Jardin lineup (management must here point out that it is, at this time of year, actually a combination soup/bread jardin, to be technical-minded) of assorted impecunious individuals, and one of them (it is not clear whether he is a volunteer, a staffer, or just an above-noted assorted impecunious individual, although he is certainly not a Franciscan Sister of Mercy or, indeed, of anything else) just hands you out of a box.

A big handful. Ten or twelve at least. I’m talking Granville Island lunch money for a week-type number of cards!

And he says, “Merry Christmas, have some Christmas cards.” And he hands me a mittful.

And I say, “Huh?” because sometimes I am a wee bit slow on the uptake, and I’m wondering if this is going to be followed by some kind of pitch, or if, indeed, he has rolled some poor old widder lady, the sole hope of penmanship on the Downtown EastSide, and stolen her Christmas cards, but no, it appears that he merely has a whole whack of cards that the Catholic church wants him to give away, so he does.

Will I burn in Hell if I think to myself that his offer means I should be wearing a more expensive kind of jacket to be walking around this neighborhood in? Perhaps I will, and I struggle for a moment with the idea of handing back the cards to give to the needy, but that’s what he’s already doing, for lo, I certainly have more than eight friends, and I certainly have no more money for no more fancy West Side cards.

And, as it turns out, these Downtown EastSide nun-sponsored freebies do, in fact, look pretty spiffy:

So, the world of Christmas cards is divided into two kinds; the kind you buy at the store, and the kind that fall from the sky like flakes once you run out of money.