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Did you get your letter yet? The one telling you your credit card interest rate is rising to 24 percent and your grace period is shrinking to 10 days?

You might have thrown your letter away unopened. It probably looked like a junk-mail offer for insurance or a brokerage service. My husband and I opened ours and, after poring over small type and gobbledygook, finally got the message: We were getting a lump of coal in our stocking.

My first impulse was to call up the card company and scream at somebody. An irate phone call, however, seldom fixes anything. It only makes life hard for the poor person whose job it is to field such calls. Instead, I tried charm and tact.

"Hey, how are you? My name is Deanne. I'm calling from Virginia. We just got a letter about new terms for our credit card. Could you please tell me what that's all about?"

The explanation did not bring my blood pressure down. Hard times for the industry, blah blah, asking customers to share the burden, blah blah, raising rates for everybody, blah blah. It's not personal.

I said, "Really? You're doing this to all your customers?" My screaming impulse was returning. "Do we have any options?" Why, yes, the phone person said. You can accept the new terms or close your account.

We chose not to share the burden with a bank that just got a billion-dollar bailout from the government. We closed the account.

But that turned out to be only Letter No. 1. Another arrived shortly from our other credit card company, and now the decision was hard. If you ever travel, shop online or have an emergency, you've got to have a credit card. We were in a predicament -- we and millions of other people.

Consumer advocates say card companies are scrambling to make as much money as they can before the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act takes effect in February.

You can read details of the new law at www.whitehouse.gov by searching for the phrase "credit card fact sheet."

The law imposes strict limits on how card companies can treat their customers. It bans unfair rate increases, requires contracts to be in plain language, gives cardholders 21 days to make payments and offers extra protection for young adults such as college students. The news media and TV talk shows are covering the situation in depth.

Pundits and bloggers also are tracking the developments, as are ordinary folks who are really annoyed. All of this is happening just before the holidays, the time when we are most likely to shop with credit cards and let the balances ride until January or beyond.

The more we read online, the more determined we were to fight for a fair deal. We ended up going to our credit union, where we got a new card with a low fixed rate. We consolidated all our consumer debt on that one card and dumped the others. That felt good. But I'm still angry.

We played by the rules. We carried small balances and always paid on time. We thought of ourselves as model customers and good citizens.

And, if you believe the pundits, we were the very people the big card companies didn't want -- the ones not generating any income for them through interest and late fees.

I know it's not personal. I know holding a grudge against big financial companies, two in particular, won't hurt them and will put a damper on my holiday spirit.

So I'm working on a new strategy. Every day when I drive past the credit union, I smile and think, "Ho, ho, ho, guys. And ha, ha, Wells Fargo and American Express!"

Giles County native Deanne Estrada is communications coordinator for a global agricultural program managed at Virginia Tech.