OH CHRISTMAS CARD, OH CHRISTMAS CARD

BY DAN MILLER
(originally posted December 8, 2005)

Receiving and opening Christmas cards is one of the true pleasures of the season.
But they're piling up at our house.
Not the cards we've gotten this year, but the ones from years past.

For the entire year, Karen keeps all our cards in a big red basket, and around early December we clear out the ones from the previous year and put in the new ones we've received.

The thing is.... it's becoming difficult to throw out old cards.

It used to be that everybody bought boxes of cards that were mass produced in a factory somewhere, then just signed their names.
Those were easy to eventually dispose of.

But nowadays, with digital cameras and printers, everybody's creating their own cards.... and, as often as not, they'll include photos of the family, or at least the kids.
And it's just plain unsettling to discard an actual photo of a child.... even if you can't remember whose kid it is.

Somewhere in boxes, I have stacks of pictures of the children of friends and distant family, who I couldn't identify if I were under oath in a court of law.
Whoever they are, I'm sure they're grown, and by now they're probably sending us pictures of their kids.

And speaking of Christmas (Holiday) cards.... I saw an advertisement for a company that will take a card you design at home..... clean up your design -- and print them -- so they look like professional, store-bought cards.

Wait a minute! Doesn't that defeat the purpose of a homemade card?
Isn't a homemade card supposed to look like you made it at home?
Why should I work on creating a card, then have professionals fix it to look like I went by Kroger and bought it?

Well, I need to go now.... I need to find another drawer somewhere to store all these photos....
And Karen and I are trying to decide which picture of McKensie to attach to our Christmas cards this year.

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