Bendles,

My dear Mervyn and Daphne

Verily the delight of Christmas time is the communication from one's friends - especially when such an exquisite card conveys the greetings. Many thanks.

Personally this Christmas I have excelled myself! Heather, that charming [...] who filled in some of her vacation helping me one way and another, including making cards from photographs of which I seemed to have innumerable prints, was not satisfied until they went into envelopes with pencilled initials where the stamp would go... I had a feeling we were going too fast. Well to begin with I took a card (with photograph on it) out of an envelope before writing the address on it and always seemed to be saying "Oh! No that's not good enough" or "Oh! No, we won't send him that - he wouldn't appreciate the finer point of that print!" as the case may be.

..."By the way Daphne, Heather and I decided to put you on the first page of "portraits of famous people" and you look pretty good!"