All my carefully budgeted time and energy has evaporated, turning to a mist that rises up around my head, causing me to become disoriented and a little woozy. I'm Christmased out.

My intention is always the same: 60 Christmas cards, no more. Absolutely not another one. I buy three boxes, 20 to a box, and 60 stamps. Then I start through addresses I've got scattered in all manner of files, notebooks, Ikea tins and two outdated Rolodexes.

It's hopeless. Each name conjures up a face, some connected to a time and place mostly forgotten until the holidays jog my memory, others representing new friends I'd like to know better. But who has time to write pen-in-hand letters? Get real. Start with your matron-of-honor and your mother-in-law and work down. Sixty. That's it.

Seven days and counting; I'm not going to make it.
Time to get ruthless.

I take out last year's haul and thumb through it. The best ones are the photo cards. A friend's kids are dressed in look-a-like tartan vests. Cute. Can't throw that away. If I don't send them a card I won't get another picture.

I lose myself in the newsletters and hand-written notes that are dropped by the bundle through my mail slot the last two weeks of the season. The rest of the year the mail consists of bills, credit card come-ons, charitable appeals, catalogs and flyers. At holiday time, I'm blessed with the thrill of receiving real mail written by a real person with actual tales to tell. Even if it IS just about their cat or a new computer: no matter. I read and re-read the cards, then save them to read again, because they are small journals of our past.

Through all the griping, I know deep down that the physical gifts of the season will all pass away, but the people on my Christmas card list, distant though we are, move forward with me year after year. If we don't make that special effort to reach out at the holidays we'll lose each other. Which really means we'll lose an important piece of ourselves.

The road back to the card shop is paved with good intentions. I couldn't cut anybody off my list because that would mean that next year they'd cut me off theirs; just think of all the new babies and hip replacement surgeries I'd miss.

Thank goodness I've also discovered that E-cards have undeniable advantages for the holiday harried. Hallmark.com, which launched five years ago, said it has been sending out approximately two e-cards per second, and anticipates that traffic to its Web site could increase dramatically in the next week as recipients log on to pick up their holiday e-cards.

We live in a shrinking world where those who celebrate Christmas are by no means the majority, and the 'mall mentality' excess of the holiday has definitely taken hold. But beneath the presents and baking, the cards and the decorations, the magic (however tarnished) is still close at hand, creating a season that will always endure.

So, for better or worse, here's to Christmas:

Here's to the guy who dresses up in the Santa Claus outfit and tries not to scare the babies. Here's to the lady who urges 15 squirming preschoolers to sing "Away in a Manger" at the local rest home, and the firefighters and cops who work on Christmas Eve. Here's to harried salespeople fighting to remain courteous against all odds, here's to a mug raised against the cold. Here's to twinkling lights brightening the streets and the eyes of children, the smell of a real Christmas tree, the kindness of strangers and the warmth of real fires in real fireplaces.

At the end of the season, when the last dead Christmas tree is hauled away and compacted into mulch, the last ornament carefully tucked away in its tissue for another year, may we look back on December 2001 and feel good knowing that we have been responsible for creating, to some measure, the season that Ebenezer Scrooge's nephew observed in Dickens' A Christmas Carol:

"...a good time, a kindly, forgiving, charitable time, a time when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts more freely to their fellow creatures."

Posted at 12:59 p.m.