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Face it: it's that time of year again. And I don't just mean to trim trees
or hang lights or buy gifts. I mean it's time to get out the gold pen and
the holiday stamps and send out your annual Christmas card.
Make no mistake about it, choosing the right card takes a lot of thought.
Are you the type who likes cuddly baby animals or more of a religious theme?
Do you prefer reindeer, Santa Claus or winter snow scenes? Or are you, like
my friend Shirley, more of the Gingerbread Man type?
So this year I've decided to bypass the whole card-choosing issue and do
what any typical, proud mother would do: find a picture of my family and
turn it into a card.
I started by sorting through the last year's batch of pictures for one where
my entire family looked happy, relaxed and well-tanned, preferably taken
somewhere in nature. Not too much to ask, right? But, shockingly enough,
after going through several stacks I found, you guessed it, not one single
picture that fit this criteria. So I went back through and tried to find a
picture with three of us smiling and one of us with good hair. Then a
picture with most of us clean and sort of grimacing. And then finally just
any picture that had all four of us in it fully dressed at the same time.
Still nothing, except for one taken in the mid 90's on the day we brought my
son home from the hospital. But this would only shock and confuse people.
It was obvious from all this that we'd have to get a new picture taken just
for the card. So we all got into our good velvet clothes and I called my
neighbor Linda to come over with her camera.
"Quick, come take our picture," I hissed into the phone. "Before someone
gets a running nose or sneezes or picks up the cat or something."
Now Linda is an avid picture taker so you'd think that chances are that ONE
picture would come out decent enough to be used as a Christmas card. YOU
WOULD THINK. So imagine my surprise, then, when I got the pictures back
and saw 24 pictures of a rather surprised looking red-eyed family standing
in front of various household appliances.
So I took matter into my own hands and moved on to plan number two: take
pictures of the kids outside among all of the festive holiday decorations.
Mind you, I use the term "festive" loosely since all we had in front of our
house was a string of colored light bulbs put up sometime in 1992.
Then I remembered the upscale neighborhood, three blocks away, where each
year everyone went overboard with decorating their front lawn.
It was a brilliant plan.
"You can't take pictures of our children in front of stranger's houses," my
husband said. "What will our friends think?"
"That we got a bigger house and trendier Christmas lights?"
"Very funny."
The good news is that these pictures came out great. I had fabulous shots
of my children posing in front of cutout wooden snowmen, reindeer, and even
between the Three Wise Men in a miniature cardboard manger.
The bad news is that in the end my husband was right, it just seemed, well,
deceitful to send those out. Instead I chose a rather plain picture of the
kids sitting on the living room floor holding an ornament.
But that's OK. You see, today I received a photo Christmas card from my
old college friend Lisa who lives in a condo in South Florida. It was a
lovely scene of her family gathered around a cozy fireplace mantel holding a
cat. Except that, as far as I know, she doesn't own a cat or, for that
matter, a fireplace. In fact, now that I take a closer look, I'm not even
sure that's her real husband.
And somehow that comforts me.
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