By JIMMY DUNNE
I finally got around to going through our basket of Christmas cards tonight.
It always has to be just the right moment.
Because a Christmas card isn’t mail. It’s time travel.
Going through them reminded me of an old fraternity brother, Frank Ramsey. From Madisonville—a town smack in the ribs of Kentucky.
Frank’s dad was a University of Kentucky basketball legend… who went on to win seven championship rings with the Celtics.
In Kentucky, that’s not a resume. That’s sainthood.
Winding down my senior year in college, he was our guest speaker at a dinner at our fraternity house for all of us knuckleheads.
He raised his glass, and in that incredibly thick, relaxed, confident, real-deal Madisonville drawl, he said… “Boys, listen good. You are who your friends are.”
I just wish I could describe the pace of that sentence. The confidence. The calm. Like he wasn’t offering a thought—he was handing us a law of gravity.
He went on to say the friends you choose in your life become, in many ways—a mirror of who you are. Because you borrow a little bit from all of them, and they borrow a little bit from you.
I think he was right.
It’s easy to look back at those childhood pals, first loves, those friends you once couldn’t imagine living without—who now live at a distance. Not because anything broke… but because life kept moving.
They were shooting stars. They didn’t stay forever. But they were real light while they were here.
On the flip side, some friends along the journey didn’t show you who you wanted to be—they showed you who you didn’t want to be.
They mattered, too.
They all add up. Everyone ends up in the soup of you. Some are the meat and potatoes, some just a smidgen of seasoning. But they’re all in there—shaping your beliefs, your style, your courage… even your blind spots.
They challenge you. They hurt you. Inspire you. They root for you. They warn you. They test you.
Friends.
And if you’re really, really lucky—a few even love you.
That’s why I’ve always found it funny how Christmas cards keep trying to reinvent the wheel with some new, clever, hipper way of saying ‘Merry Christmas.’
The truth is, I kind of wish the cards didn’t have any words on ’em at all.
Just the pictures. And that one handwritten line… “Thinking of you.”
It doesn’t matter what they write.
What they’re really saying is, out of all the people in the world—I picked you. I wrote your name out on an envelope. I put a stamp on it. I dropped it in a mailbox. Just so you’d have a small moment, a real moment… to go back. To those wonderful days.
And when we open their card—when we look in their eyes on that glossy, little rectangle—I think they know what we’re going to do next.
We’re going to remember.
We’ll remember when we were on the same beautiful road. Taking it all in, looking ahead—and somehow believing it would always feel like that.
Goodbye, Christmas cards.
Goodbye—till we meet again.
(Editor’s note: Jimmy Dunne is a modern-day Renaissance Man; a hit songwriters with songs on 28 million hit records, songs, scores and themes in over a thousand television episodes and many hit films; a screen writer and producer of hit television series; award-winning book author; an entrepreneur and Pacific Palisades “Citizen of the Year.” Subscribe to his substack and reach out to him at [email protected])
ANOTHER wonderful thought from Jimmy Dunne…….Thank you Jimmy.