holiday card hustle

Beginning the first year I was married, I sent 200+ holiday cards to all of our wedding guests plus pretty much everyone I have known since elementary school. We had one iconic picture from our wedding day that I made into a postcard and sent out as a combined holiday, change of address and “hey look we got married” announcement.  From that year forward, the holiday card process expanded and became an extensive, complicated December project. 

For about 22 years, I put a lot of pressure on myself to create a clever card that didn’t follow the traditional format of a standard holiday greeting. Why create this pressure? I am still trying to figure that out but it was my singular, annual creative effort and a “regular” card just didn’t feel right for me.

A lot of holiday cards would start arriving at our house on Thanksgiving weekend but I did not care if my card arrived first – that’s not my game. The starting point in the creative process was finding inspiration for the catch phrase. To do this, I would often google “funny holiday cards” or “top 10” lists for that particular year. If I were making a card this year, I might try to weave in one of the following slang terms, “lowkey,” “cap,” “sus” or “cheugy” (all four of these were vetted and approved by my daughter and her friend.)

Once I chose my concept, I then had to figure out how to print the card the way I wanted it without costing a fortune or being forced into an uncomfortable font. I enjoyed the creative process but really hated gathering and updating addresses, buying stamps, stuffing envelopes, and then printing address and return address labels. I was always careful to avoid the larger or alternate envelope sizes that would create a need for extra postage because that’s just too many extra steps. 

I would have to say that my best holiday card was this one in 2005:

I need to confess straight away that this card idea was pretty much handed to me by my friend CJ’s boyfriend. This was 2005 and the iPod was everything. I was able to email a photo to a site called “iPod my Photo” and got this image back very quickly. This theme was so on point in December 2005 that I knew it would be very well received by everyone except my mom (“but we can’t see their faces!!”) 2005 set the bar a little higher for future cards and thereby caused the 2006 card to be a bit of a let down (I went with a take on a reality show title and it definitely fell flat.)

Other holiday card highlights have included the phrase “hope your holidays are on fleek” ahead of that phrase being entirely played out and another card employed a # before some people understood the idea of hashtagging (i.e. people older than me.) A low point occurred in 2014 when we sent out a really well designed infographic but spelled our daughter’s name wrong. Was every year a complete hit? Obviously not. But, there were a string of really solid efforts and I got some really fun feedback and often heard from people I had not spoken to in a while. 

Along with sending out hundreds of cards , we, as a family, began a yearly tradition where we would compile all of the cards we received and vote on the best and worst of the year. Lots of tiny text that was hard to read could place a card in the bottom five cards we received. Any amount of cleverness in the photo or the text could mean top of the bunch. Topical, clever wording would always be rewarded by a majority vote. People who included tons of tiny pictures or wrote more than detailed five paragraph essays suffered in the ratings. Card evaluations became a part of holiday tradition (and still are) but our last card went out in 2018. 

After more than 20 years of trying to be creative and edgy on my family holiday card, I gave up on the effort two years ago. For years, I felt like there were compelling reasons to create a card – people needed to see my kids grow up, see photos of a new puppy or enjoy my incredibly clever take on holiday sayings – but that feeling dissipated in 2019. Maybe it was the political climate, or the fact that my kids were grown and this year’s picture would look a lot like last year’s picture or the thrill was just gone. I used to look forward to my card “dropping” and getting feedback on my one annual creative outlet. 

Years ago, my husband wrote a mock-holiday card that we texted to just a few people. It included the following phrases:

“Our son continues to disappoint us. He’s clearly doing the bare minimum, grunting out monosyllabic responses to us before retreating to his room…Our daughter is a hot mess of hormones and hate. In July, we took her to the emergency room as excessive eye rolling had detached her corneas…The two of us are surviving on a menu of avoidance and self-medication…” 

Several years later, I still laugh really hard every time I read these sentences. I think I could get myself excited about this process again if I could find a way to be like “The Onion” of holiday cards. Potential headlines include, “Suburban man displaced from home ‘office’ due to dinner party” or “College kids find compassion for parents technical handicaps.” I am going to workshop this in 2022 to a small audience and see how it goes. If you’d like to opt-in to this experiment, please let me know in the comments below.