Holiday cards stress me out.

I don’t like you, holiday cards.

Don’t get me wrong; I love you. I really do. I love the idea of you, and the fact that you exist, you charming throwbacks to the heyday of snail mail. I love GETTING you from my friends near and far, seeing pictures of the kids and pets and all the rest. Bonus points for the funny cards, the holiday letters (yes, I’m pro holiday letter) and most definitely the one from the family friend who sends a detailed list of his favorite books of the year.

But I do not like you, holiday cards. And now I’m going to stop talking about you in second person, because I feel like you’re starting to look sort of hurt and sad, your merry fonts and snowflakes looking all droopy, and that’s not what I want. Because really, this isn’t about you it’s about me.

It’s about how pre-emptively guilty and exhausted and burdened and annoyed (at myself) holiday cards make me feel.

EVERY YEAR, Alastair and I go through the same dance. Sometime around Thanksgiving—or shortly thereafter, when some overachiever friend’s card shows up in our mailbox—one of us says, usually with a heavy sigh, “Are we going to send holiday cards this year?”

And instantly, I feel the weight of a medium-size rock added to the metaphorical pile of rocks atop my chest that represent my many to-do’s and responsibilities, which are gently, politely crushing me: work, bills, housework, de-cluttering, getting around to fixing that rip in Elm’s jeans (the one they don’t want there, not the one they do), buying Christmas presents, buying birthday presents (the kids’ b-day is stupid December 28th), figuring out which charities to donate to, figuring out what the hell to make for dinner, trying to read a book now and then, etc.

Why is it such a big damned deal to churn out a simple holiday card, you ask? You upload a family photo to Shutterfly or the like, you slap it onto a “Seasons Greetings” template, you hit “order,” you address envelopes in front of the TV, send them off to friends and relatives and call it a day. Right?

HA HA HA HA HA HA. No. Not for me, anyway.

First and foremost, the chances that we’ll have a decent, recent picture of the four of us that we all like are increasingly miniscule. It used to be simpler, when just Alastair and I had to approve—make sure we didn’t look too fat or old or stupid, and that everyone’s eyes were open. But now we have two 13-year-olds who will KILL us if we dare distribute a photo in which they do not look adequately awesome.

Some people, I realize, plan ahead and make a point of doing their holiday card picture every year. I wish we were that family. But we’re not. In fact, the years we send cards are basically the years we just happen to get a good group shot.

2019 was a banner year, because we went on a big road trip to a lot of national parks and EVERYONE was taking family photos—and enthusiastically helping each other take them. Cries of “Hey! You get in there too and I’ll take it!” echoed throughout the majestic landscapes. I took what I’m pretty sure was a Pulitzer-prize-worthy photo of a French family in Bryce Canyon. Some Taiwanese guy in Canyonlands National Park spent like 10 minutes art directing pictures and live video of our family under the Mesa Arch, to the annoyance but grudging admiration of everyone around. Our tour guide in Monument Valley took so many pictures of us it bcame ridiculous. (“How about a picture of you guys in front of this butte! This rock! This trash can!”) Honestly, after that trip, we couldn’t NOT send a card. It would have been disrespectful to everyone involved. I mean, just look at this:

We did have some nice hikes and outings in 2020 that could potentially have been good photo ops, but asking total strangers to take pictures of you was not de rigeur this year, what with the plague and all, and it’s not like we were venturing out with our buddies en masse. In fact, I think the sole family photo we managed to get, courtesy of my mom, was on a whale watch we took in Maine this summer—where, in fitting 2020 style, we saw zero whales.

It could work, but I’d have to use the cropped / altered version of it below, because Elm and Clio don’t like the way they look (Elm likes their outfit, though, so that stays) and Alastair doesn’t like that it shows him before he lost 20 pounds. As for me, somehow I didn’t put it together the fact that maybe I should take my mask off, so you can only see half of my head. At least the shot captures the essence of the trip, though, what with there not being any whales in it.

OK, but even if we don’t have THE perfect family photo, we could certainly do some sort of collage of multiple photos, right? After all, we have some decent shots of various combinations of us, right? Yes….but. Again. Not so simple. Everyone has to approve of their representative shots, and the pictures have to look at least somewhat decent when put all together, because I am a perfectionist and like to make my own life more difficult.

So I will inevitably spend three hours on Shutterfly trying to find a decent template—one that doesn’t say something like JOY! FAMILY! SPARKLE! in big silver letters all the hell over the place, or invoke Jesus—and rearranging the photos within the template. And Shutterfly will crash repeatedly during this process, and I’ll have to start over at least four times before getting to a final product I like. And then I get to the checkout and realize that it’s going to be like $229 + shipping for 30 cards, even with special code GIFT4U.

Of course, I left out the whole intermediary step where I ask Alastair how many cards we should order and he’s like “I don’t know. Who are we sending them to? Do we have a list?” (He’s really extremely helpful in all this, as you can tell. Although, to his credit, he is more often than not the one who says “let’s skip it”—and then forgets he said it and on December 23 asks “Did you order holiday cards?” God damn him to hell.)

So: I search my computer and find a list of who we sent cards to in 2016 (because that was apparently a good family photo year), but I haven’t yet compared it against the stack of holiday cards we got LAST year that I’ve been saving and planning to use to update our list of people to send cards to this year. (And: do we really have to send cards to all of these people? And I know at least a third of them on the 2016 list have sinced moved….)

This is typically one of the several points in the process where I abandon my cart at Shutterfly for a few days, and then start getting chipper “Hey! Did you forget something?” and “Your promo code GIFT4U is about to expire!” emails that make me want to cut someone.

Oh, and I forgot the whole step where I try to craft a message for the reverse of the card wherein we pithily sum up the year—this year, that would require trying to strike that all-important 2020 as tragedy / comedy balance and not sound like assholes in the process. The message portion of things could delay things for as long as three days, while Alastair and I go back and forth on edits. (This is the problem with being a family of artists / writers.) And God help us if the kids catch wind of this and THEY want to weigh in too.

(Oh, and I also left out the part where, while I’m on Shutterfly, I see the unfinished 2014-2015 photo album I started making a couple of years ago, and want to die.)

By this point in the ordeal, it’s generally around mid December. And what we’re really looking at now is a New Year’s card. Which is fine — it’s what a lot of people do and what we usually do. But I almost wish it *wasn’t* an option, because it means WE STILL COULD AND PROBABLY SHOULD TECHNICALLY DO THIS THING.

But I don’t want to do this thing. I just. Don’t. Want. To.

I don’t want to make the cards, I don’t want to figure out who to send them to, I don’t want to wait in line at the post office for an hour for stamps hoping I’m not inhaling SARS-CoV-2, and I don’t want anyone to think that because we send a card this year means we’re going to send them every year, so that if they don’t get one from us next year it means we hate them.

There is so much else I need and want to do instead. For example: Spending two hours writing a post about why holiday cards feel like a goddamned burden.

Let me say it again: it’s not that I don’t love you, holiday cards, or you, the people who send them. It’s that I love myself more. So I’ve made up my mind: I’m going to honor that love by giving you the big kiss-off this year. And any other year I want.

Furthermore, I’m going to try very hard not to feel bad about it. It may require some extra cookies and wine, to get me into that “the hell with it!” zone, but I’m ok with that. It’s Christmas, after all.

And to you, my overbusy, overachieving, overguilting friends who may be reading: If the gift of ditching the holiday card rock-on-your-chest is one you’d secretly like to give yourself, I hope you will. 🎄

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