It used to be a tradition, or warning, I'm not sure which, about writing your thank-you letters after Christmas. It was supposed to be good luck to finish them before the new year. The younger you are, the less you'll understand what I'm saying.

I grant you, I'm a nut about thank-yous, rabid, you might say, and out-of-sync-with the times. Yes, well, I'm not the only one who buys the beautiful hasti-notes the Metropolitan Museum of Art sells in their gift shop, and online, which is how I get them. It's all very well for a number of people who grudgingly acknowledge that there is something to saying thank-you and who therefore write e-mail thanks. Better than nothing, often necessary usually useful. But....

I slide into a permissive attitude and sort of accept the grateful e-thanks I get, and I have developed a kind of grade system for the expressions I receive - on a score of 1 to 10, 10 being the best. That has enabled me to compromise and award a good e-thanks up to a 6, but no higher. Still, I knew I was waffling. Then I came across a guest column in the National Post, written by Ted Bishop, the author of "The Social Life of Ink" (Viking Press), and I backed up to my original stiff-necked stance. Here's the first line of his article:

"Graydon Carter, editor of "Vanity Press", sends most of his advertisers handwritten thank-you notes every month: 'Well, wouldn't you want to be thanked if you were cutting a $100,000 cheque?' Clearly a texted 'Thx!' doesn't cut it."

When my husband died, I hung out my shingle as a free-lance writer and tried to write everything in order to make a living for me and my kids. For one assignment I had to interview June Callwood, whom I had never met. She was generous with her time and information and I wrote her a thank-you letter. She wrote me back! She said she had never been thanked for an interview before and she really appreciated it.

Well, you know what they say about the pen, mightier than and all that. Just saying.

Christmas is just fine, isn't it? After all the lists and check marks, we're here, almost past it, still a lot of eating to do. This is my 84th Christmas (84th birthday coming up in February, narking the end of my 84th year, beginning the 85th - do the math). All the Christmas dinners of my life have become an amalgam of memories. According to Dr. Wilder Penfield and his pinprick experiments (poking different parts of the brain to see what memories emerge), if an incident or event registered in the first place, judicious prodding will bring it up again. The key word is registered; it had to have recorded itself in your brain first, specifically, then cumulatively: a pile of similar experiences adding up to the Ghosts of Christmas Past. We conflate time and look down the wrong end of a memory telescope to view the past, distilled to a kind of single, continuous event. The playwright Thornton Wilder wrote a play "The Long Christmas Dinner " (1931 ) in which the members of a family gather, emerging and disappearing as they come to life or die over 90 years. Another playwright A.R. Gurney wrote a play, "The Dining Room" (1982), reminiscent of Wilder's play, in which the central character, if you will, is the dining room, over a period of years and a collection of people. Distillation is inevitable.

Summers are long, hot and lazy; winters are frosty; fall gleams and spring...erupts, if we're lucky. So - Christmas. Of course, a few of them stand out, and I won't go into detail. You have your own ghosts and memories to deal with. It's a time that invites memories of past people, still alive to us however long ago they lived. On the whole, we should be grateful, even as we miss them still. Long-term memory is so valuable. Have a good one.