So with snail-mail currently even slower than usual on account of the snail is currently dead on account of the Mail strike, it got me to thinking about cards. Not the cards that have numbers on them and can lose you a lot of money, the kind of cards you send out only at this time of year, which is why they’re called Christmas cards. I was thinking that the current lack of getting Christmas cards probably doesn’t mean that people are getting lazy about sending stuff, or that cards (like everything else) are way more expensive than they used to be, so I figure there’s actually a concrete reason why no Happy Holidays greetings are arriving in the mail - our friends and family don’t like us anymore.
Kidding of course, the mail carriers aren’t carrying the mail and there’s no Pony Express anymore and even if there was the Ponies never did run in Canukland anyway.
Like many people, we hang the cards we receive at Christmas on a string across the wall so that they can be ignored for the entire holiday season. And then after Christmas the Better Half keeps some and cuts up some to make gift tags out of the pretty pictures on the cards instead of using cheesy sticky tags from the dollar store like I do. As Joni Mitchell famously said: “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til they paved paradise.” - at our house, with only two Christmas cards hanging on our wall like two sad chickadees alone on a telephone wire, I realized I really miss them. Especially the ones where folks write in a little message, or even better – ones with family photographs. A screaming baby on Santa’s knee, kids looking at their shoes, and adults with really bad hairdos are my favourite Christmas card photos. And I’m talking about my own family Christmas cards.
Yes, every year for decades we’ve rabbit-holed that traditional gong show called The Annual Christmas Card Photo. It’s always a bit of an adventure – sometimes like family dentistry (i.e. like pulling teeth), sometimes unbelievably complicated, sometimes a slam-dunk – but always another special something to remember about each and every Christmas.
Thank goodness Einstein invented the self-timer for cameras. Or perhaps it was Kodak, but without it you couldn’t do a group selfie if you were taking your own Christmas card photos. You know – set up camera, get the group together leaving a space for dad, dad clicks timer on camera and he has ten seconds to get back to his spot without tripping over the dog and with .5 seconds to go, smile a cheesy ‘Say Cheese!’ smile and FLASH! And then do it again. And again.
Back in the Paleopanosonic Era, when your camera was a camera and not a phone, you had to put something in it called “film,” and you wouldn’t know what your pictures looked like until you dropped off the “film” at a super high-tech place called a “1 Hour Photo”. After two hours, you would get back your precious Christmas Family Photos only to find 23 shots of your youngest kid making very ugly frowny faces and one shot where dad’s eyes are closed because he’s exhausted from running back and forth and tripping over the dog 24 times.
I speak from experience. This is pretty much what happened on several Christmases at the Hay house over the years and did I mention we also had two dogs and a cat that “had to” be in the Christmas photo. Now that’s what I call a gong show.
But we finally this week have the 2024 family Christmas card ready to go and we are sending out 55 of them this year! Now all we have to do is mail them…
Harley Hay is a Red Deer author and filmmaker. Reach out to Harley with any thoughts or ideas at harleyhay99@gmail.com.
