Card List

It's time to write our Holiday letter and get it ready to send out. I have a vague recollection of reading somewhere that it's traditional to send them out the week between Christmas and New Years and I use that tidbit to at first procrastinate and then one year I finally decided to just make that my own little tradition. Some people like to be the first, we have one family member who always sends it in January or February after the big rush and me, I like to do it in that "in between" week. So today, I started looking at the mailing list. It has stayed much the same for many years but there are always a few additions and a few deletions and a few address changes. This year, I had to remove both of Tim's grandmothers who passed away this year. Last year, I did the same for my grandmother. That was tough. I still haven't deleted them from my Contacts list. I just can't bring myself to do it.

I do enjoy writing a Holiday letter. We usually send out a photo too. It was much easier wrangling 2 kids into a photo and now that there's 4, we just take what we can get. Thankfully, someone got smart and started offering those cards where you can put more than one photo onto the card. I think it must have been a mom who was sick and tired of trying to get all of her kids to sit still, smile and look at the camera all at the same time.

Tim couldn't care less about this little tradition of mine. He dutifully reads the letter after I've written it and get me the addresses that I request but other than that, he'll have nothing to do with it. I read all of the letters we receive and look over all of the pictures marveling at how much everyone has grown or what has been done over the past year. If there are letters or pictures from good friends of his, I point them out and he reads them and looks at them but this is my thing and he does his part well when asked.

This Holiday card and letter thing is quite the deal. We have one friend who keeps a list of those they've sent them to each year and who reciprocated and if they don't get one back for a couple years in a row, they're off the list. Some take the time to be very witty or creative with their letters. Some just send a photo. Some just send a card. Some just send a letter. Some send a letter, card and photo. It's fun to see the variety and yes, I save them all. I put them all into our scrapbook for the year and it's fun to go back and look at them every now and then. I figure that it will be something that will really be enjoyed 25-30 years from now. We'll have a big snowy day with nothing to do and we'll end up looking at old albums by the fire and it will be fun. Sounds nice.

So for me, thank you to all who send us Holiday cards, letters and photos. I love all of them and look forward to getting them each year. I'll strive to keep my letter to 1 page and will probably go through several re-writes to achieve it and one of these days soon, I'll wrestle the boys into some decent clothes and make them sit for a photo.

Here's to enjoying the process!