It’s easy to feel like you don’t recognize your own country when cruelty and chaos ooze daily from the White House, leaving a murky film over so much of what we cherish.

It’s easy to feel like the hard-won progress toward making this place a more welcoming, more inclusive, more equitable home is being rapidly, gleefully rolled back.

It’s easy to feel like compassion has, in so many of the hearts on display, been snuffed out by callousness.

But here’s another side of our story.

Three years ago, I wrote a column about a campaign to send holiday cards to LGBTQ+ folks who’ve been shunned by their families because of who they are or who they love.

The campaign was launched by Carolyn Pinta, co-creator of the Pinta Pride Project, an organization that raises awareness and support for the LGBTQ+ community. Her card campaign was inspired by Home for the Holidays, a Facebook group that provides a safe space for LGBTQ+ people who can’t, actually, go home for the holidays.

In November 2022, Pinta started a spreadsheet with addresses of members from the group who wanted to receive holiday cards, set up card-writing parties and added information to the Pinta Pride Project website for anyone who wanted to send or receive cards. When I checked in with her 10 days before Christmas that year, she had collected 2,134 cards.

One hundred of those were written by my long-lost childhood friend Sarah, who let me know that she read about the campaign and joined from California. She knows the power of mail: Her son has osteosarcoma, a rare type of cancer, and he also gets cards from strangers.

Pinta repeated her campaign in 2023, and the response was overwhelming. By the end of that holiday season, they had sent out close to 10,000 cards.

In 2024?

“Oh, more than 50,000,” Pinta told me a few days ago.

More than 800 writers signed up to send cards last year. Cards were written from and sent to all 50 states and a handful of countries. People magazine wrote about the outpouring of love and allyship.

The campaign is, naturally, back this year.

“People start reaching out, I’m not kidding you, in August,” Pinta told me. “‘Are you doing that card-writing thing again? I want to participate.’”

Companies across the country host card-writing days, Pinta said. Alpha Phi sorority at Miami University in Ohio gathered to write dozens of cards. Families weave card-writing into their Thanksgiving celebrations and text Pinta the photos.

“I get pictures: ‘Here’s my 20!’ ‘Here’s our 50!” Pinta said. “It’s so much fun.”

Folks who receive the cards also send Pinta photos — of their tables covered in cards, their refrigerators covered in cards, their mailboxes stuffed with cards. Many of them stay in touch with Pinta and her kindness army year-round now.

A card is a small thing, stacked against rejection from your family — the people whose eyes should light up at the sight of you, at the thought of you. An avalanche of cards wouldn’t fill that hole.

But a card is something. It says: I see you. I support you. You deserve love and joy and a whole, full heart.

“I’m not sure what I expected at first,” Chicago teacher Stephanie Guest emailed Pinta at the beginning of December. “I think I simply wanted to help people who might be suffering, feeling sad or trying to find themselves. But the more letters I’ve written, the more I’ve realized how much this experience has benefited me as well as, hopefully, others.”

Sometimes she adds a few lines about a book she’s read recently.

“In these dark and sometimes frightening times, I find myself relating deeply to the world’s suffering,” Guest wrote. “There’s something comforting about sharing words with others — even people I may never meet.”

That’s everything, isn’t it? Looking for ways to connect with and care for the people around us? Taking whatever warmth we’ve been given and feeding it so it glows brighter and longer and farther? So more people feel it? So cruelty and chaos and that murky film are no match for it? So cruelty and chaos feel unrecognizable, not routine?

We have that in us. Clearly. Tens of thousands of holiday cards say so.

And that’s also part of our story — the one we’re living through, the one we’ll look back on, the one that’s still very much being written.

©2025 Tribune News Service. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.