Australian Newsagency Blog

I was tidying Christmas cards and noticed a mature lady spending a long time looking at cards. My offer of help led to her sharing a story of a tradition she follows that goes to the heart of the season.

My customer was not there to buy a card but to look at them - to read the words of the Wife cards. Her husband died a few years earlier and he always went to great lengths to find a card with just the right words. He didn’t say much when alive and Christmas and Birthdays were the times he let her know how he felt, through the cards. She has a box of them in her ‘linen press’.

Each Christmas she visits a newsagency or a card shop to read the cards her husband would have browsed. As she told me yesterday, she feels closer to him at Christmas for having done this.

I left her to browse and went about my business, happier for the encounter.

Customers have the most wonderful stories.