Now that Christmas is here, I'm pondering things that last. It's hard to focus on old technology when new products fill the stores, but there's a case to be made for not abandoning things that work. And that's true whether we're talking about family traditions or digital tools.

I am, to put it bluntly, ready to dig in my heels against certain forms of change. Author Neil Postman often cites an old adage about the things we use: "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." He is referring to our compulsion to transform our daily tasks so they adapt to the technology of the moment.

Take digital greeting cards. Companies such as Blue Mountain and 123Greetings.com let you pick out a design for your card, often including a musical selection, and usually involving an animation that moves about the screen in a swirl of dancing Santas or Christmas elves.

I love getting digital Christmas cards. But I draw the line when it comes to sending them to relatives. What a handwritten card delivers that a digital one does not is a sense of personal involvement from the sender. To write by hand is to express more than can be constructed with a few mouse clicks.

Old fashioned? Maybe so. But consider this. My wife has a recipe for banana bread that came down to her from her aunt. When she typed it onto a card 30 years ago, my wife left out the necessary two eggs. Her aunt, seeing this, took the card and wrote "2 eggs" on it with a pen.

We looked at this battered card the other night and saw her handwriting amidst the typing. Had she taken the card and typed in the same "2 eggs," the incident would be long forgotten.

It was seeing her handwriting again that conjured up her memory one holiday evening, and made that recipe something more than a digital database could convey.

I like old things that work well, which is why I collect old pens. My favorite is a 1941 Parker Vacumatic in a beautiful design that Parker called "Gold Pearl." I've polished it, put in a new filler, tweaked the nib and brought it back to life. It writes with a smooth, even line, and holding it in my hand makes me think about 1941, the tumultuous year that took America into World War II.

I use that pen every Christmas to write cards to members of my family who are scattered all over the country. I write long, discursive notes because I enjoy the feel of pen on paper, and I get long, handwritten notes back. Writing in longhand is about the expressiveness of the individual hand as it forms letters on the page.

Steve Wozniak, the wizard who built the first Apple computers in Steve Jobs' garage, talks about the time he spent days figuring out how to do a simple homework assignment on an Altair, a primitive computer he had built from a kit. He finally wrote a program that would do the job, but the effort made him ask some key questions.

If we're doing something in a roundabout way by computer that's better done by hand, aren't we focusing on the wrong thing? Maybe we should let computers do what they do best -- sorting, filing, finding data. And maybe we should emphasize what we do best, which is the human side of communication, the qualities of support and presence.

I think about Wozniak's question whenever I'm knee-deep in a software problem. Sure, I'll figure out the answer, but am I willing to devote an entire day to the attempt? I decided "no" one recent afternoon and went back to finishing up my Christmas cards. Focus on what's important, that's the ticket. And have a wonderful holiday.