Carded

It’s the last few days before the holidays. I am finishing up with all of those things on the “to do” list before Christmas. This was the weekend to accomplish things. Big things.

One of the items on the list was to send off the gifts that had to be mailed. I still had a few to purchase, then pack them up and get them to the post office. Done.

And as of today, the holiday cards are done. I will be putting them into the mail tomorrow.

Last year, I was feeling particularly curmudgeonly, and did not do holiday cards. In my mind, I guess I was feeling sorry for myself. I kept thinking about the fact that I do the cards every year, I buy the gifts every year. I plan the holiday every f….g year. Merle does not.

And last year, he didn’t write out the cards. He kept bugging me that they should get done. But I didn’t do them. And he sure didn’t. So, they didn’t get done.

This year, for some reason, I seem to be ahead of the curve in my holiday preparation schedule. Compared to almost everyone else in the world, I may be slow. But for me, things are going great. It looks as though I may get things done before Christmas gift opening this year. I will admit that there have been a few years when I was still wrapping gifts on Christmas morning, in between breakfast and the start of the children handing out the gifts to the recipients.

Online shopping has been a godsend. My entryway is filled with boxes to be wrapped, but by God, they are here, in my house, just awaiting that covering with gaudy holiday paper and bows. Can’t forget the bows….although I have in the past. Just so that you don’t get the wrong idea, my tree is up-hurray!-but it is not yet decorated. We didn’t quite get to that this weekend. But hey~ there are still three more days until Christmas. Really. No one else will see it until then, anyway.

Back to the holiday cards. Today was my day to get that done. A few weeks ago, I finished the annual family update letter (Yeah, I know, I know…..but I kind of like them…I read all of the ones we receive), and had sent it out for approval from the rest of the family. All was a go.

In the past several years, I have also included a collage of some of the past year’s photos. It is a pretty big job, sorting, and arranging, rearranging, and trying to format the whole thing to fit. It usually turns out pretty well. We’ve actually had people comment on some of the photos from past years.

Today I spent a long time on the photo collage. I had balanced out the photos so that each child and grandchild was fairly evenly represented. I included a few relatively good photos of Merle and me. In the past, I had included photos of my sister and mom, but then didn’t have photos of Merle’s brother and his family. So I made certain that only our immediate family was included in the photos. The photos ranged over the course of the entire year. The mosaic was balanced so that the larger photos were the best. The smaller ones were still very good. It took a lot of revisions, additions, deletions, but I thought I had done a very good job. I really liked it.

Then I made my mistake. A huge mistake. I don’t know what I was thinking.

I asked Merle to look at it and wondered what he thought.

Thus began one of the biggest arguments we have had in many years.

When I asked what he thought of it, he commented that “You can sure tell who chose the photos”. Well, that was it. We didn’t speak for several hours after that one. I won’t go into all of the sordid details, but the cards did finally get done. We are sort of back on speaking terms, but only because he made his own collage and did all of the printing of the letter. Then he made a nice dinner.

The cards are all addressed, stamped and stacked for mailing.

The recipients will have no idea of what went into those cards. They will look at the card briefly, toss it into a pile, and it will be in the trash within a day or so.

Little do they realize that it will likely be the last holiday card they will ever receive from us.

Happy Holidays!

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