I have become delinquent in the holiday cheer.

I have yet to even sit down and consider who will be getting gifts and what those gifts will be. I have not thought of a Christmas card list and I don't know what to do with the ones we've started to receive. Finally, I've barely delved into the Christmas music I look so forward to pulling out every year.

What the heck is wrong with me? I love our tree (which we frequently refer to in a high-pitched voice as "Treeee," like Amy Poehler in her "Michael Jackson in a tree" sketch on Saturday Night Live). I'm itching to watch A Christmas Story this year -- though Casey hates it -- and am considering purchasing the bonus-loaded DVD. But I can't seem to get my act together.

Maybe this weekend will help. Maybe tomorrow's sugar-fest, the gathering of Mom's college friends and families for the annual cookie bake-off will help. Maybe our planned trip Sunday into the depths of Christmas shopping insanity at the upscale Mall at Short Hills will snap me into form. Maybe I just need the panic of realizing I still have gifts to buy for everyone to whip me into shape.

At the moment, my Christmas card strategy is to send them out to those who send them to us. Casey is better than me this year, having sent out a handful yesterday. I've just written one, and it sits next to me here at work. I've managed to pare down my overloaded box of cards from the past few years, so I feel comfortable purchasing new ones again, which I think I'll do in the next hour when I run out to grab some lunch. I'd prefer to go back to putting together homemade cards using my own photos (I've fallen in love again with my nighttime shot of a snow-covered Notre Dame campus, a lighted tree in the foreground and the brilliant Golden Dome in the background), but the cards, naturally, are blank inside. At the moment, I don't have the time to sit down and write out the messages within, let alone come up with a message to put in there. My handwriting isn't beautiful to begin with, so a rush job would only lead to hideous scribbling. Maybe in the next few weeks I'll pull together some negatives, take them to a developer, and produce several images for next year's cards. Then I can hold onto all the cards I receive this year to come up with the perfect message, and I'll have 11 months to either write them out or print them onto labels to stick inside. Of course, I'll do all that, but forget about them until next Dec. 12 or so and be in the same bind.

The convenient thing about sending cards out only to those who send them to you is that you can just hold onto the envelopes and have the addresses at your fingertips, not having to worry if they're the most up-to-date locations for the college friends who move every year. You also avoid the problem of determining if the address you have is the pre- or post-nuptial site for that friend married in the past year.

But I've decided I need to update my addresses. My contacts in my Hotmail account are spotty, to say the least. I have old addresses for some, nothing but a name and e-mail for many others. In some cases, the e-mail is out-of-date and I have no way of tracking them down. So I pulled out the old Norman Rockwell address book I was given upon graduating from high school. It's interesting to look through it and see the names I have listed there. People from high school whom I haven't spoken to since -- which will be 10 years this summer, meaning a reunion I can't see myself having much of a desire to go to unless I get some confirmation that some of my closer friends will join me, and I'm not sure I see that happening. There are some college acquaintances in there that I haven't thought of in years, people I met moments after (in some cases, weeks before) stepping on campus whose friendships faded before the end of the first year, or even first semester. I've found old addresses for friends and family members that are a house or two -- in some cases, a wife -- ago. I have no idea how to write to my older cousins, one of whom lives no more than a 10-minute walk and half a mile from where I sit now. And yet I've clearly pulled the book out within the past two-and-a-half years because I have Casey's parents' addresses on the second page of the Bs.

But the most amusing piece of information I've found is the original card that gives me my campus ID, e-mail address and password I received upon enrolling at Notre Dame. It's an off-white card the shape, though slightly larger, of a personal check. The type is a typewriter font, similar to what might be produced by an old, noisy printer chattering back and forth producing no-frills documents in the days before color laserwriters.

I've also found the handwritten piece of paper that contains the names, dorm addresses and phone numbers of those first seven people I met in the area send-off a few weeks before we left the Jersey Shore for South Bend in August 1994. With the exception of one, they were all written by the people themselves. Linda G. was a good friend for those first few months, a friend with a closer bond by virtue of the friends we had in common. She even invited my pal Walker to her prom. James D. was an outgoing guy who, by the end of the first month on campus, knew half the freshman class. He wasn't the arrogant, careless party guy though. Two years later, when the football team went to Ireland to play Navy, he ran into my ex-girlfriend from high school, who was studying in Europe and had gone to the football game. Lord knows why.

Ani P. was written in my own hand, and she wasn't much of a talkative one. Not to me, at least. I don't think she liked me, and we didn't really speak after that first meeting in NJ. Marisa's name is written so lightly I almost didn't see it. There's no last name and until I saw the Walsh Hall dorm address, I didn't even remember her. A friend and I stopped by her suite once that first semester, but after that I barely saw her. During the Easter holiday one year -- sophomore or senior, I think -- I was walking across campus when someone in her family asked if I'd take their picture in front of the blooming flowers. I did so and continued on my way; she gave no indication of recognizing me. Colleen B. was a quiet girl who came off as a bitch. I couldn't put my finger on it. Her sister ended up being in my sister's class and living in the same dorm. While waiting to fly out for Jess's graduation, I smirked at an incident between the girls' father and a Northwest flight attendant at Newark. That kind of explained some things.

Shannon D. was a firey redheaded Irish girl who, by the end of the first month, knew half the people in the freshman class, AND was that careless party girl. She got drunk more the first week on campus than I did the entire first semester (as I eased into alcohol). She also hooked up with half the guys in the freshman class (not me, though; I wasn't pretty enough). We didn't hang out in the same circles until she joined the newspaper as a photographer. Then we occassionally talked in the office. Finally, there was Ken K. Out of everyone on this list, he's the one I spoke with and spent time with throughout college and beyond. I've run into him a couple of times since, once when he called me out of the blue after moving back to New Jersey from California. Haven't talked to him in a year, though.

So that's today's journey into the past.

Dammit, now my hand's cramping up. No writing, I guess.