A Wrong Number Sent Me Their Family Christmas Photo For Six Years
In one sentence: A stranger’s mistaken Christmas text turns into years of family updates, making one man unexpectedly invested in people he’s never met.
I told them in year one. They kept sending it. Last year the photo had an empty chair, and I cried at a bus stop.
* AI Illustration
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Swear It Happened — CASE FILE #354
87% BELIEVED
I replied: "I think you have the wrong number, but you all look great."
They replied: "Ha! Sorry! But thank you!! Merry Christmas!!"
The next year, it came again.
I said, gently, that it was still the wrong number.
They said: "We know. You're on the list now."
I am not making that up. I got put on a list.
For six years I have received: Christmas photos, one graduation, two dogs (one new, one — I assume — replacement), a photo of a caravan captioned "SHE'S OURS", and, in 2023, a video of a very small child eating a lemon, which I have watched maybe forty times.
I have never met them. I do not know their surname. I know the dogs' names.
Last December the photo arrived and there were four people in it, and there was a chair, and the chair was empty, and it had a folded jumper on it.
The caption said: "Merry Christmas from all of us. Still all of us."
I stood at a bus stop and I cried, properly, in public, at a photograph of strangers.
I typed and deleted about fifteen replies. Everything was wrong. Everything was too much or not enough.
In the end I sent: "Still all of you. Thinking of you."
She replied — I have always assumed it is a she; I have no idea — with a single heart.
This year I will get a photo in December. I have started to be frightened of December, which is an absurd thing for a thirty-four-year-old man to admit about a group chat he was added to by accident.
If you are reading this, and you are them: the caravan was a good decision. And I am sorry about the chair.
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