Our holiday mailing, sent to member homes in November, included a membership renewal form for 2020. We’re already off to a great start with nearly a third of our 2019 members welcomed back for 2020. We hope you’ll add your renewal to the momentum and send the form with payment to our assistant membership secretary (and keeper of the Post Office Box!) Bill Beem. You can also always join online through the membership section of Shop.OzClub.org. Is there’s an Oz fan in your life who you think would enjoy the Club? Consider giving a gift membership; we included that form, too.
There was also a ballot that’s due Feb. 15. Although the positions aren’t contested, we appreciate knowing if members agree with our nominating committee. Susan Hall who has long been active in our Club agreed to count the votes as they came in and report back. An envelope addressed to her is included for your convenience.
This year’s greeting card is a fun one featuring two Oz favorites, Jack Pumpkinhead and the Patchwork Girl, hanging their stockings on a fireplace. The original artwork by the Oz Club’s own Dick Martin is currently in the collection of Jack Van Camp who offered it for our card. We believe it is previously unpublished.
Inside we added the text of L. Frank Baum’s 1905 “Christmas Stocking” essay. The Baum family celebrated Christmas and Frank wrote this piece as an introduction to a series of small books that were marketed by publishers Reilly and Britton as “Christmas Stocking Books.” Our “Happy Ho(z)lidays” graphic was used in Oz Club cards for decades. Enjoy!
The flier for the Club’s 2020 convention Aug. 6-9 in East Aurora, New York, should whet your appetite for the wonderful weekend Cindy Ragni is organizing. We’ve opted to make all meals optional this year and she’s been working on finding more affordable options, so registration itself hasn’t yet opened. To keep up with convention news between fliers, follow OzConvention.org. We can include more details there and will add the registration option as soon as it’s ready. You will be getting a flier for the west coast OzCon International, too; at the last minute our printer caught a typographical error that made the dates confusing, so we pulled it from this mailing. That turned out to be advantageous because the dates have since changed to July 17-19.
And finally, there’s a letter from me touching on some of the highlights of 2019 and thanking a number of our more active volunteers who made so much happen for our Club through the year. Of course, the membership year isn’t quite over; your Winter 2019 Baum Bugle will bring you a celebration of The Magic of Oz. And leave all of you trying once again to pronounce Pyrxqzgl.
