Holiday Cards

What do you think of when you hear the word, “stationery”? Do you enjoy spending time in Hallmark stores and boutiques like “The Papery”? Or do you cringe at the thought?

I like paper. Not in a Dunder-Mifflin kind of way. No, I like writing papers. When I open my mailbox and see a handwritten envelope with an address label of one of my friends, I smile, walk quickly back into the house, put the stack of mail on the counter, then pull out the special envelope and put it at my place at our kitchen table.

I delight in its existence. I can’t wait to open it.

But I do.

I make a cup of tea, kick off my shoes and slowly sit in my chair, eagerly awaiting the discovery of the contents of the special envelope.

“Mmm…nice stationery,” I think as I flip over the card.

Yeah. It’s a moment for me.

When I was a teen, my friends and I loved to discover beautiful papers or fun cards. We wrote letters to each other even though we lived less than a few miles away. We wrote to each other at summer camp. My favorite stationery was a fold-over Snoopy note card that served as its own envelope. Fold the bottom up and the top down, then turn it around and boom! There’s your address box. Sort of like a postcard, sort of like an envelope.

Later,

when I was engaged to be married, I thoroughly enjoyed selecting our wedding announcements but, by that time, I had moved well past Snoopy to a very traditional, formal style.

Then, when Soapbox Dad and I were newlyweds, I remember having difficulty deciding on holiday cards. He wanted formal, straightforward holiday cards. I wanted either cleanly designed or cutesy cards with gushy sentiments like, “Peaceful New Year” or “Joyful Christmas” or “Fuzzy Warm Feelings.” We usually settled on some inoffensive compromise card with toned down but sincere sentiments.

Then we had kids. And the need to announce their births. I remember spending way too much time selecting our first child’s birth announcements.

Soapbox Dad and I actually visited a store in our town that had samples of birth announcements pasted into over-sized, unwieldy scrapbooks that weighed about fifty pounds each. We hoisted several books onto a huge desk and slowly thumbed through each book, carefully turning the pages, letting our imaginations replace the name on the card with our daughter’s name, which at that point was still an unknown.

After weeks of deliberating and seeking advice from our parents, we selected announcements that, in retrospect, were probably more formal than our family’s current lifestyle and a little more to our parents’ standards than our own.

We played it safe.

After the kids were born, the next great stationary challenge was the annual holiday card. If we ever considered being overly formal and sending William Arthur or Crane, I don’t remember. The driving force was our desire to share a photo of our baby girl.  So the first criterion for the cards was the ability to hold a photo.  Options were extremely limited.  In fact, the first year we just used a traditional holiday card and inserted a photo of our little girl.  As soon as we had two kids, we found a card style that worked.  We used double stick tape to attach a photo of the kids to each card.

The most challenging part of the holiday card had less to do with the style or the sentiment of the card and far more to do with successfully capturing a lovely photograph of two smiling children.

Photographers would use bubbles, toys, puppets, jokes, and other creative means to try to get a good photograph of the kids.  I would stand off to the side and try to laugh, giggle, make faces, or do whatever I could to get both of them to smile at the same time.  All we needed was one good shot…

Eventually I tried to take the pictures myself.  Heaven knows why, but I thought a seemingly impulsive moment might be more effective.  If I could just wait for good afternoon light when the kids were both in good moods and/or just had a snack and turn a quiet afternoon into a photo shoot, I was bound to get a good shot. Sometimes it worked and other times…

Keep in mind, this was back in the days of 35mm photography.  Film in cameras.  Shooting three or four rolls of film not knowing whether any of those pictures would be suitable for a holiday card.  Then taking the rolls of film to the store to be developed, waiting for them to be shipped back, flipping madly through pack after pack, hoping and praying for that one special shot.  If I happened to be lucky enough to have one good one, then I would have to sort through the negatives to find the shot, go back to the store to order a hundred or more copies of the picture and wait for those to come back. Argh!

And which card would I use?  Who cares?! I would use whatever folding paper could hold that *$% picture that I finally had and would actually send to friends and family before the holidays were over!

Whew.

There had to be a better way.

Enter the joys of modern technology.

Cue confetti, happy music and smiling faces.

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