Recently I wrote my annual end-of-year letters, to send with cards to distant friends by hard copy, or email for those who, a few years ago, initiated the switch to electronic holiday greetings.

I have to admit the emails and e-cards I sent off that day made communications far less time consuming, as well as reducing what had once been a high snail mail cost.

Still, the absence of many actual cards, in both the sending and receiving of them, has reduced some of the holiday magic. There’s something about writing with a pen, positioning the card crisp against your hand, that a keyboard and screen can never replace, at least not for me. Something about opening an envelope, knowing that someone devoted a little time to a handwritten, personal greeting, that e-cards cannot duplicate.

My holiday letter was too long. I’ll blame the ease and speed of the keyboard. If I’d written it by hand, my aching fingers would probably have demanded a rest long before the almost 1,000th word was reached.

As it was, I felt compelled, as I always do, to pour out all the highlights and non highlights of the year. Truth is, if not for my mind being full of all the other to-do’s of the season, there would have been even more. But it was only the next day, after everything had been mailed, and I had a head-clearing night’s sleep, that I remembered my granddaughter’s summer as a camp counselor, my participation in the Hot Chocolate Run fundraiser and a few other things. What treats my distant friends were missing! The desire for a part two letter was strong, but impractical.

Sometimes I wonder if anyone gives a wit that my teenage grandson, whom they have never met, is going through a noticeable growth spurt, that my granddaughter, also unknown to them, continues to have a kinship with animals, that my husband loves to play and talk about his bridge games, or that I still devote time to writing beyond just letters.

My friends’ letters started arriving this week. Some of them were as long as mine. I scanned through them, finding them to hold as little interest for me as mine will have held for my friends, filled as they were with relatives, acquaintances and situations which were totally unfamiliar to me. Like mine, they were loosely strung together lists of the past year, and like mine, they didn’t tell the real story — the meaningful things in their lives that, if I hadn’t moved away decades ago, I would easily associate with them.

No one knows of my major ear surgeries and continuing hearing problems, of how empty my home felt after my mother’s death, of how much certain friends mean to me, or how important my church, my writing and writing sisters are in my life. No one knows of my husband’s and family’s joys and difficulties and sorrows. No one knows me any better because of the letters.

My guess is, that just as I view them, the recipients will still regard me as I was 40 years ago and not as I am now. Forty years can make huge differences and changes.

So why do I pursue the annual letter writing ritual? Perhaps it’s a chance for me to review my own year. Or maybe it’s simply another opportunity to do what I love — write. But it could be because, despite the huge disconnect of time and place, neither I (nor my distant friends) can let go of the one remaining link to lives that once were interwoven.

Like traditions — the Christmas tree, the holiday food, the gathering of one’s family — there is something grounding about the letters. They hold us in a place of familiarity, carrying as they do a piece of our past, a reminder of who we were and the ways in which we once belonged.

That is a half-empty and half-full glass condition. For me there is sadness at the life I walked away from: it’s people; its rituals; its now unknown opportunities. And there is happiness at what followed that loss. A new life, new friends, new interests and opportunities, all distilled into a new sense of belonging. There’s joy in that. It’s the life I made, not the life that, in a sense, would have been preordained had I not emigrated from my homeland.

But sometimes I do wonder about the other me, the one that’s still alive in the minds of those far away people. I wonder if I would even recognize her, should I be able to travel back in time and encounter her. And I wonder about the friends I left behind, if we would still be walking the same paths together, should I have stayed.

Claire Day, an ex-pat from northern England, is a retired educator and local writer who lives in Easthampton.