Santa comes but once a year, like your birthday, but somehow it seems longer between Christmases than birthdays. December feels like it has 72 days rather than 31, with the 25th kind of always just out of reach, like that dolly zoom Hitchcock used to do where the thing in the middle just lurches through space. Sakes.

I haven’t sent my letter yet, but as previously stated, it is short, with mostly a thank you and an ask after the family and Jack Frost. (I have been a good boy this year, and even an OK man, from time to time.)

Gift No. 3. Patience

if in this world

(which is somewhat adrift)

i could give my child one ideal Christmas giftthis year i would choose an activity long pastholding a life lesson which I hope would last.

it isn’t expensive or fancyin factat its heart is a simple, plain household object from which I learned a strategy of how to cope.

What is it?

A self-addressed stamped envelope.

it’s NOT the perfect gift, you say?

well understand, back in MY DAYyou wanted something really greatit’s possible you’d have to wait

say, if you had exciting plansto join a cool club meant for FANSyou’d have to deal with writing cramps(they didn’t waste their cash on stamps)

you get 2 envelopes (no less)on one, you put on your own addressthen take the next (a bit more wide)and put the first one, stamped, inside

send all of that to where they askand then you face the hardest taskwords in the fine print - hard to see

“allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery”

today, that’s a truly significant gap from the time you want something ’til it’s in your graspbut this was a late seventies paradigm: we paid for some things both in money, and time

at this point, we had no choice but to simply waitand after few weeks achieve a keen stateof true patience.

a zen-ish faiththat all was good, knowing that it would show upwhenever it would

and then (in the most meta IRL thing)one afternoon your friendly postman would bring youA LETTER FROM YOUstuffed with little surprises(impressively small due to restrictive sizes)

but whatever the prize they had started the buzzit was rarely as good as the wait for it wasample space to imagine, guess, and lightly fretas to what you eventually were gonna get

now Chronos and all the Norns suffer neglecti think that they all deserve much more respectin our age of “right now”s, where not much is tactilei believe the best present is

“after a while”.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lowerblackpain.substack.com