A few weeks ago I mailed out Christmas cards. It's something I've done for about a decade now, mailing out cards to close friends and random strangers. (Last year, for instance, Harlan Ellison received a card from me. Since I'm writing this, it clearly didn't displease him.) I usually have a "main" design that goes to a limited number of close friends, and then the other cards are a little more varied.

This year's main design was awesome. It was also expensive, so I didn't buy many. Before the cards arrived in the mail, I made up a list of my friends who I thought deserved the card. Then I started to pare it back because my list was longer than the number of cards I was to receive. Tough decisions were made.

When the cards arrived in the mail, I discovered they had little room inside to write!

This, of course, posed a problem as I liked to write little notes in the cards I sent out to personalize them. I decided, instead, to write a Christmas letter.

I don't have a copy of the Christmas letter with me, unfortunately — it was something I wrote at work on a slack afternoon two weeks before Christmas. But I remember — roughly — how it began. And this is sort of what I said...

I'm a baseball fan, and I'm one of those people who think that baseball describes life. If baseball described my life, then 2011 was a rebuilding year. When it began, no one had great expectations for the year, but it wasn't bad as it progressed. It had its requisite victories and its inevitable setbacks, its thrilling moments and and its drudgery. But then, midway through the year, life dealt a blow, and even though it wasn't unexpected, it was still a blow, and it took a little time to regroup and figure out a new direction. Down the stretch, things looked up, some promise was shown, and the year ended on some hopeful notes that bode well for the future. A rebuilding year, then.

And as a Chicago Cubs fan, if I don't have hope, then I don't have anything. :)

There are a lot of things I'm going to remember about 2011, and it's difficult to say today what I'll remember the most. There are bad memories in 2011, true, but there are also a lot of good memories, and the things that stand out for me are simpler things. Things like traveling, which is something I hadn't really done in several years. I went by train to Raleigh in August, I drove to New Jersey in November, I saw Philadelphia briefly. Not earth-shattering things, but they were memorable and important nonetheless.

I'm really thinking about 2012. Not in the "Mayan end of the world" kind of way, not in the "Presidential election" kind of way. In a personal kind of way. In the "these are the things I want to do," "these are the things I want to see," "these are the things I want to accomplish" kind of way.

And yes, LEGO Lord of the Rings is a part of that. :)

But there are bigger ideas, too. And hopefully, I'll figure out how to make them all work.

After all, the whole point of a rebuilding year in baseball is to make yourself better for the next season. ;)

At times, I think of myself as an amateur historian. It's unsurprising that I think of myself in that way; I was a history student in college, after all, and my library is filled with history books, from general histories of the world to histories of specific periods to histories of specific ideas. Among the niche histories in my collection General Howe's Dog (a book about the dog owned by General Howe during the Revolutionary War, which was lost during the Battle of Germantown) and Birth of the Chess Queen (exactly what the title implies — a book about how the Queen evolved and become the most powerful piece on the chessboard).

What can I say? I have varied interests.

The thing is, many people have favorite periods in history. They're fascinated by the American Revolution, or they're captivated by the Edwardian era (thanks to BBC costume dramas, of course), or the early industrial age tickles their fancy. Or any of a dozen, a hundred other periods.

I like them all. There's always something new to learn.

Flappers

I love the medieval period. Castles and crusades and feudalism.

I love the Age of Fighting Sail and the Napoleonic Wars. Not just for Sharpe and Hornblower, but because an entire continent was at stake. I'm not a believer in the "Great Man of History" theory, but Napoleon is one of the few truly captivating figures to stride across history and leave his mark upon the world. Or Horatio Nelson, who is one of the rare figures in history to die at precisely the moment when history no longer needed him.

I'm fascinated by the colonial period. I'm especially intrigued by the French and Indian Wars. I also find it interesting that the final battle of the English Civil War took place in Maryland.

World War I is endlessly fascinating to me. I've recently read Harry Patch's autobiography. (Patch was England's last survivor of the trenches. Radiohead did a song about him in tribute, and it is achingly beautiful.)

And that's just four. There are other periods that are just as compelling to me. Just today, I was listening to a radio documentary on the French Wars of Religion, the suppression of the Huguenots, and the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve. And not because that has anything to do with Doctor Who. ;)

So history is something of a hobby. :)

There's one period I find particularly fascinating, partly because I find it so inexplicable — Prohibition. The Roaring Twenties aren't quite what I love about the era, though I admit I do feel a certain pull toward the Jazz Age and the world F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote. I love the Art Deco stylings of the time, I love the architecture of the period. "An expensive orgy," Fitzgerald called the period, and somehow the party went on because of — or in spite of — Prohibition.

I admit that the criminal side of it doesn't interest me a great deal. I could care less about the bootleggers and the criminal enterprises. What fascinates me is how a country decided to legislate a narrow view of morality, and then an underground culture grew up around it.

I realize that Prohibition was not just like The Great Gatsby, but it's romantic to think so. In reality, for most Americans during Prohibition, life continued to be nasty, brutish, and short, much as life had always been. But you think about the speakeasies, you think about the flappers, you think about the jazz, and you realize that people were having fun. There's a line in Joyce's Ulysses that goes (and I'm doing this from memory), "History is the nightmare from which we awaken," and in a way, that's what Prohibition was. It was the time when society awoke from the patterns in which it had been stuck.

Now I feel like rereading The Great Gatsby... ;)

And tomorrow, I may have a different idea of what time period has my attention. For all I know, it could be the Swingin' Sixties, or it could be pre-Roman Britain or it could be the Han Dynasty in China. Such is the life the amateur historian leads, following his interests down whatever road they carry him.