It’s a simple thing within Canada – sending Christmas cards.  Not so simple with the international flow of language, postal services and currency.

But really … all of that isn’t important.  I knew life would be different in Belgium.  I will jump through the hoops in order to make life work.  I signed up for Europe, with all its beauties and challenges.

First step: find five Christmas cards for five fine human beings: Lance, Nona, Jaxon, Jagger and Jace.  Easy peasy.  In the first store, an employee showed me a tiny display of Christmas cards.  The only thing on offer were packages of maybe ten identical cards.  My five loved ones aren’t generic.  So that won’t do.

Second store … same result.  But the woman serving me suggested the Standaard Boekhandel store.  “They’ll have what you need.”

Indeed they did.  Before you is one of the cards I found … in Dutch.  I smiled to think of my English-speaking relatives opening their cards, to be greeted by incomprehensible words.

Happily, Google Lens lets me take an image and translates into English.  Here you go:

Time for one Christmas party

Play your best Christmas hits on “Repeat”

Buy a tree up on the ceiling

Fill the glasses and enjoy

Cool.  Inside the card, I translated for the dear Canadians.  Hallmark’s words were different on each one.  So were mine.  Except for three little ones: “I love you.”  Jody’s brother, his wife, and their three boys each needed to receive the direct message.

In Canada a quick trip to the bank machine would have given me the cash I wanted to tape to each card.  Of course it wouldn’t be that easy internationally.  Friends advised me that currency exchange stores charged big fees.  “Go to your bank.”

Sabine, my advisor at Beobank, is marvelous. But it took a few days for the bills to arrive. In the long run, who cares? I will produce the result.

Friends also said that I shouldn’t send cash in the mail. “Big chance that it’ll get stolen.” Do bank transfers. I understood. But I wanted my loved ones to feel the texture of real money. I vowed that a post office employee would advise me how to send cash pretty safely in the mail. And she did.

Then there was yesterday. Messages translated, mine added, funds attached, envelopes sealed … and I was off to my local postal outlet in a variety store.

The woman serving me was dedicated to my success: five cards in their envelopes tucked inside a padded one, a sending method that provided speed and very unlikely to be opened by postal officials.

She attached stickers. I paid. We smiled. And I sauntered off into the world … happy like a cat with milk on her lips.

Ahh …