• Mood: optimistic
• Music: Corrinne May—Beautiful Seed

THANK YOU LETTERS

One of things my mom managed to instill in me while I was growing up was the necessity of writing thank you letters. If I had been a guest at someone's home or received a gift from someone, it was good manners and a courtesy to respond to it with a written thank you note. Writing cards or letters at all seems to be gradually becoming a lost art, which is a shame since getting "real" mail in the post is one of the nicest ways to make someone's day. Over the years I've gotten several surprised and grateful thank you responses to MY thank you cards, which is a pretty clear indicator that such courtesies are not necessarily commonplace any longer.

One of the things on my 6-year-old nephew's Christmas wish list this year (among all the PlayStation and Xbox and Wii requests) is to get "Mail every day." Wouldn't that be lovely? Mail every day! And I don't think he means bills and junk mail and advertising and more bills. I think he means cards and letters from his friends and family. What more could you want for Christmas?

I haven't written a lot about politics here or the election, but I couldn't sleep for 2 nights running for worrying that the crushing disappointment of 8 years ago (4 years ago I was just numb) would be repeated. I have been less and less proud of the government of my country over the past near-decade and less and less willing to admit my nationality to strangers or other foreigners. As a military brat who has spent a great deal of my life overseas, not being proud to be an American has been a horrible feeling, and I am thrilled that I can once again hold my head up high.

President-elect Obama has a hard road ahead of him. The uphill battle is nowhere near over and the magnitude of the mess he has to begin cleaning up must seem staggering. I hope he can continue to handle the weight of so many people's hopes and that the American people will realize that THEY have only done the first part of their job. It's up to all of us to help him get the job done.

I suspect that Mr. Obama's mailbox is overflowing with mail, both with the thank you kind and the good luck kind, along with every other kind of mail you could ever imagine. There's another one coming shortly from Sweden, courtesy of my half-Swedish, half-American daughter, karinek: Letter to the President

And this post is mine: Thank you, Barack. Thank you so much.

Cracking Me Up: Obama Comes Out as French