On kinkeeping, card-making and passing on the family calendar

Learning to love the invisible labor that makes the holidays possible.

For the past few years, I have been making a calendar of family photos for the Texas side of my family that gets together around the holidays.

The project grew a little by little each year, and I was noticing its weight. I didn’t mind the task, but it was another ball to juggle.

Around Thanksgiving, my cousin Carlee asked how the calendar was coming. I said I hadn’t started. She said that’s the kind of thing she loves to do. “Want to do it?”

In four words, I passed on what has become a beloved tradition for the whole family.

In four words, I asked for help with the kinkeeping.

The holidays are, frankly, full of tasks like this. Small and not-so-small projects that lead to small and not-so-small moments of joy and frustration and tears of happiness and, well, other things.

From buying and decorating trees to scheduling family gatherings and cookie decorating parties with your pickleball friends, these activities typically fall to women. My working theory is that they fall to women because women have the most to gain by keeping them.

Maintaining vast networks of people who share positive associations in your presence means that if shit hits the fan for you and possibly your offspring, you have people who can act as your safety net.

Holiday stories from The Invisible Thread:

All I want for Christmas is ‘generous authority’

A stitch in time that almost wasn't

'This is what satisfaction feels like'

What St. Lucia taught me: You can't force tradition, even at Christmas

My gut tells me that as we age, these tasks become less reliant on one’s ability to run errands and hang Christmas lights and more on your ability to remember who was born in what year and what our late loved one’s favorite holiday memory might have been.

This calendar is one of many kinkeeping tasks I’ve taken on over the years as a gift to the family. And nothing represents this part of my life more than the address book I got when I was in high school. That flower-covered notebook has followed me through the years, each entry a clue into the archaeology of my social network that requires no internet.

Address books might be the most important tool in anyone’s kinkeeping box. I can remember my grandmother’s address book, which, over her lifetime, slowly filled with small marks she used to indicate when someone had passed.

I wondered if I might one day fill my own address book like she had. Would I one day know too many people to fit in the pages?

Facebook completely changed what it means to “stay in touch.” Many of us feel like we are in touch even though we haven’t had direct contact in many years.

But at the holidays, I’m reminded that there are quite a few people for whom social media is not enough. They like writing addresses on envelopes and getting stamps and feeling the spark of dopamine when they put that little note in the mail, knowing that in a few days, it will deliver its own little endorphin spike to the person receiving it.

I didn’t do the family calendars this year, but my kinkeeping project this year is a little different: a translated version of a 1924 letter my relative gave me when we were visiting Sweden earlier this year.

I knew from the moment this long-distance cousin handed me this frail piece of paper that my gift to the family this year would be to translate it.