It’s not very often you have a night so absolutely perfect you want to turn it over in your head again and again. I had a night like that last weekend, and I raced home to write it all down.

Last week I was flipping through a favorite magazine, one that regularly features impressive decorating. The Christmas issue is a feast for the eyes. In this issue, I flipped through one article, in particular, that shared some detailed photos of a family’s spectacular Christmas tree.

Let me tell you, these people are serious about their tree.

My daughter has always loved her father, of course, but it’s been clear where her true affections lie. She’s been a momma’s girl, plain and simple. She’d play with her dad, and laugh with him, but when the true crises in life struck (skinned knee, lost Polly Pocket shoe), it was to my arms she came wailing.

At least, that used to be the case.

Evidently, I have Christmas cards on the brain these days.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my slightly unhealthy obsession with getting the perfect Christmas card picture, but I’m afraid the neurosis doesn’t quite end there.

Once the perfect (or imperfect, as it were) photo has been taken and printed, the labels have been printed, and the stamps have been bought, it’s time to stuff the envelopes. Which brings me to a question I have never fully answered to my satisfaction: Should I include a Christmas letter? And by that I mean, of course, the mass-produced letter explaining what we’ve been up to in the last twelve months.

In early 2003, I had a random burst of inspiration – really, I’m still not sure where the idea or the sense of urgency came from. But I wrote out a long list of questions for my then-83-year-old paternal grandfather, and I gave him a small, hand-held tape recorder. I showed him how to use it (it took three tries, as I recall), and I asked him to get to work making a recording of all his memories.

He was a little overwhelmed at the size of the project, but I gave him some prompts. I asked him to talk about growing up as the son of a sharecropper during the Depression. I asked him to reminisce about World War II. I wanted to hear – again – the story of how he met my grandmother.