okay...

I wonder why mine didn't update! There seem to be a lot of weird things happening on this forum, when I clicked on the 'roses' icon above it didn't take me back to the forum, but to a page that said ' No posts found'.

It well could be. Perhaps they feel there aren't enough new posts to keep their traffic up? If too few people are using the site, they can't charge as much for advertising because advertisers won't want to spend the money to be here. By recycling old posts without any of US reviving them, they increase their numbers artificially. Makes sense to me. My advice? If no one has posted something worth engaging with to an old thread and it has reappeared, DON'T comment on it. If no one comments, recycling does no good and their numbers aren't increased.

I recognized three or four people there, and one in particular that became good friends with my niece. We used to correspond quite a bit as well. I've never gotten the Christmas mass letters, but I would love to. I like any kind of communication from people that I know, and I especially like cheerful information in December. I may have sent a few of these myself, but they were mainly to explain changes of address and not much else. I sent people photos of my house in Cathedral City a couple of years ago with the hope that some would come to visit, but that hasn't happened yet, except for my sister. My mother would get some of the bragging letters from friends or relatives of hers, and she especially did not like them, but I think that is because they made her jealous, which may have been the point of those letters. I think she felt like she was in competition with some of her cousins. I wished she would have kept in better contact with more of her cousins so that I could have seen more of them. I also especially liked reading the letters that our cousins wrote. One in particular was a gold digger, who had divorced her first rich husband (and father of her three children) and had married the president of an Italian steel corporation. She would talk about how bored she had become with flying across the Atlantic between her villa in Venice and the brownstone in Manhattan, plus country house in Connecticut. I only sent seven cards this year, and I used to send a lot more. In the past, I printed the addresses, but this year I hand wrote all of them and inside I wished people health and happiness. Sometimes people call me after they get cards from me, and I like that. This year I bought "money cards" by accident - mainly because they were the only "Seasons Greetings" cards I saw at CVS last week, and so I had to X out the "insert money here" text on the inside - except for two cards in which I inserted some extra Mexican pesos that I happened to have in my wallet. One was a 50 peso note that I thought was pretty, and the other was a 20 peso note that I enclosed with the note: "I think this money may be expired." I did not bother to explain that I had bought the "money cards" by accident, as I decided that that was not necessary. I still liked the cards, and I didn't want people to know how careless I had been when I selected the cards.