Christmas cards are highly disposable items. I confess I've grown so jaded that I often open them over the trash and let them drop in as soon as I've studied the signatures. So it seems somewhat surprising that my grandmother preserved one Christmas card for 60 years and passed it on to me before she died. And even more surprising that I count this Christmas card as one of my most prized possessions.

Although my Grandma Eastman spent her later years in a Minneapolis high-rise, she lived for most of her life in Duluth. I stopped for coffee at her tiny apartment fairly often, especially after I had moved up north, and I always pestered her for stories about the old days in Duluth. Gram had a fine appreciation for quirky characters, and one afternoon she got to talking about "that Swedish painter we used to know." When I pressed her, she remembered that his name was Heldner . . . Knute Heldner. I knew that Knute Heldner was one of the only noteworthy artists Duluth had ever produced, and was flabbergasted that my grandparents, who were distinctly working class, had actually known him. Not only did Gram have all kinds of details about the man - he'd bought a used car from my grandparents, his wife had a French name, they lived in a loft downtown, he was shy and wild but liked my grandmother's pumpernickel bread - but she polished off her story by producing concrete proof of their friendship. "He sent us a handmade Christmas card from Paris," Gram said. "I've got it tucked away, back there in my cedar chest."

Today I keep the card and its envelope between two pieces of acid-free mat board, wrapped in all-rag tissue paper. Some day, when I can afford it, I'll have the card and envelope framed side by side. Both have turned light brown with age; both are slightly brittle. The ink on the envelope looks chocolate rather than black or blue, and the handwriting is baroque with flourishes, a relic from the days when penmanship was not only an academic subject but a point of personal pride as well. The upper right corner of the envelope is missing; no doubt my grandmother clipped the exotic stamp and gave it to some young collector.

The card itself is a five-by-seven inch sheet on top of which is glued a smaller sheet. Pressed into the smaller sheet is a wood-block print of Mary and her infant son, who are being visited by some shepherds and their sheep. The draftsmanship is less than brilliant. The baby Jesus looks more like a two-year-old than a newborn; he seems sort of musclebound, and he's got a thick shock of black hair. The shepherds, on the other hand, appear to have tonsures, making them resemble monks. One of the sheep could easily be taken for a dog; the other looks like a small cow. The third man in the picture might be Joseph, a wise man offering some sort of incense, or a servant holding a bowl of steaming porridge-it's not entirely clear.

But the composition is very pleasing, and the picture has a lovely silvery look to it, as if it had been done with ink and soft gray pencil. The print is signed in a small, sharp hand, and underneath the print Matthew 7:12 has been written out in French. In English, that passage reads, "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets." The back of the card is signed "Joyeux Noel, From Knute and Colette Heldner, Paris 1929."

This fragile Christmas card is my family's one thin, tenuous, yet genuine connection to the glamorous world of 1920s Paris. It also serves me as a kind of totem, a reminder that authentic art can be produced even in places as provincial as Duluth. For Knute Heldner returned from Europe in 1932 and made many fine paintings here over the next 20 years, winning acclaim in places as far away as Chicago, New Orleans, Stockholm, and Paris. Contemporary painters, writers, and composers hard at work in the heartland can take encouragement form Heldner's example. I do.

And I like remembering that immigrant artist's kindness in sending a hand-fashioned Christmas card to my grandparents these many years ago. Heldner could not have known that his small act of generosity would also be a kindness to me, two generations later. But so it was, and so it is. And so I have been moved at last to write this rather lengthy and belated Christmas card to a minor Swedish-American artist, dead for 44 years, in a futile but sincere attempt to return one kindness for another. "For this is law and the prophets."

Barton Sutter is a regular Minnesota Monthly contributor who lives in Duluth.

This article appeared as "A Card to Keep" in the December 1997 issue of Minnesota Monthly. Copyright Minnesota Monthly.