The metal address box sits on the kitchen table, its corners soft from thirty years of handling. Inside, cards from people who moved twice since they sent them. The ones who divorced. The ones who had another baby. The return addresses tell stories the Christmas letters never mention.

December light comes through the kitchen window at an angle that only happens this time of year. Grey and thin, like it’s been stretched too far to reach the ground. You boil water for tea, set out a stack of blank cards, a ballpoint pen that skips on the third line.

A screen can generate fifty personalized messages in the time it takes to find a working pen. The algorithm knows birthdays, anniversaries, the names of pets. It doesn’t know that Susan’s mother fell last winter, or that your cousin stopped eating meat last Lent, or that your brother’s new baby hasn’t slept through a single night since August.

The first card goes to your sister. The pen skips on the cheap drugstore paper—those cards that come twenty-four to a box, all identical snowmen with the same crooked smile. You press harder. The ink bleeds slightly into the fiber.

There’s a rhythm to this that can’t be rushed. Address the envelope first, while the name is fresh in your mind. Write the card. Seal it. Stack it with the others.

The taste of envelope glue is the same as it was in 1987. Slightly sweet, slightly bitter. Chemical and somehow organic at once. Your tongue finds the edge, seals the flap. The seventh envelope smudges when you try to close it one-handed while the kettle screams.

Five cards tonight. Four tomorrow. Not because it’s efficient, but because that’s how many fit comfortably in an evening. How many names you can hold in your head at once.

By nine o’clock, there’s a small stack by the front door. One has a coffee ring near the return address. You don’t wipe it off. Tomorrow you’ll walk them to the mailbox, but tonight they wait. Addressed and sealed and ready to become someone else’s December morning.