Not so frazzled after all

My 12-year-old had invited ten friends over for a pre-vacation Christmas party that she had planned herself. It sounded like such an empowering idea at the time – she’s almost a teenager; if she wants to have a party, leave the planning up to her.

And yet there I was, putting the gifts the girls were handing me at the door into a basket for their gift exchange, baking one last batch of snowflake-shaped cookies, mixing up white frosting for decorating the cookies, sweeping a drift of flour off the kitchen floor, moving a pile of boots and shoes from the front doorway to the mudroom as fast as the girls could take them off, and assuring Holly that yes, the hot chocolate would definitely be made by the time she was ready to serve refreshments -- even though I hadn’t started making it yet. Holly was rushing around trying to light candles as her guests shrieked and hugged as if they hadn’t seen each other in six months rather than the four hours it had actually been since school let out.

In short, I was frazzled. And not just everyday-frazzled, but holiday-frazzled, which seems to come with a sticky powdered sugar glaze covering every possible surface.

And then the doorbell rang and another young guest arrived, walking in along with her mother, Elizabeth.

“Everything looks so cozy and Christmas-y!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “And the cookies smell so good! I haven’t even started holiday preparations yet.”

Like slipping on ice – or, perhaps more relevantly, on spilled flour – her words jolted me into a different perspective. Through her eyes, and because of her words, I noticed not the spills on the floor and the dishes in the sink but the smell of cookies baking and candles burning. Not the pile of boots the girls had left in the entrance but their joyful voices as they exchanged gifts and guessed who had given each one. Not the sound of the dishwasher beeping to signal it was ready to be unloaded – again! – but the Christmas carols Holly had pulled up on her iPod before the guests arrived.

This, I now understand, is what Christmas season is like. Not perfect and magical, but not solely chaotic and stressful either. It’s both, because that’s what it means to be an adult during the holidays, at least to be an adult responsible for children’s or other people’s holiday fun. Yes, it’s true that I don’t remember any stress whatsoever during the Christmases of my childhood, but that’s because I was just that, a child. Someone else was in charge. I remember thick snowdrifts, a hot fire, a tall decorated Christmas tree, the smell of a delicious dinner cooking. But I didn’t have to shovel the snow, or refill the firewood, or arrange for the arrival of the Christmas tree, or check the temperature of the roast.

Now it’s my turn to re-create this kind of carefree holiday for my children. Holly will remember this party for the cookie-decorating, the snow-globe-making, the general hilarity of ten girls who are just a few days from being on Christmas vacation. They won’t notice that the hot chocolate wasn’t ready until hour two of the party.

Elizabeth’s words were simple but eye-opening. Walk into someone else’s house, and you don’t see mess or frazzle; you see a lovely holiday ambience. I would probably feel the same way if I went to her house at this moment.

But I’m at my house, and so I should just enjoy the aroma of my own cookies baking. There will always be more dishes to wash, but Christmas week won’t last long at all. Best to enjoy every moment of it while it’s here.

Mother's Day

I’ve never felt particularly attached to Mother’s Day. I ‘m not overtly opposed to it as a “Hallmark holiday,” the way some people are, but I just never take it very seriously. When I was growing up, my parents paid very little attention to holidays like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day; my earliest memories of celebrating either of those holidays was one year when June was a particularly hot month and my older sister decided the best way to honor Dad was for the three daughters to choreograph a swim show in his honor. This became yearly tradition, both the part in which the three of us planned out and performed our water ballet and the part in which my father said “The best Father’s Day gift would be not to have to watch a swim show.” To this day, my sister calls me a few days before Father’s Day from wherever she happens to be – an academic retreat in Italy, this particular year – to ask if I’m done choreographing our show yet. (My sister also reminds me periodically of her expectation that I will help her choreograph a swim show for Independence Day, Labor Day, and the occasional unseasonably warm Columbus Day.)

This past Sunday, there were no swim shows, but we did have a simple brunch with my parents in their new screen house, which is just about the right size to hold the four of us, the two of them, and the dog. (Admittedly, we all would have fit even better without the dog, but I didn’t want to spend the remainder of Mother’s Day searching for her in the woods. Or removing ticks from her fur.)

And somehow it just felt festive in unusual ways, far different from the usual bouquets-and-breakfast-in-bed (neither of which have I ever actually experienced on Mother’s Day, but that’s what I’ve seen on TV commercials). From Rick, I received the gift I most wanted on that particular day: he did a spring tune-up on all four of our bikes, didn’t complain about the task, didn’t ask me for any help, and cleaned the whole project up when he was done. From Holly, a homemade necklace in a homemade jewelry box. From Tim, plenty of good cheer and affection.

At Tim’s afternoon baseball game, all the mothers wished each other a happy Mother’s Day, and all the fathers who were present wished us one as well. At the restaurant where we ate with my in-laws after the game, there were complimentary chocolate-dipped strawberries served after dinner “in honor of mothers.” There was even a balloon sculpture artist at the restaurant who was specifically targeting the mothers in the room for his patter and antics; mercifully, some very swift bill-paying by Rick enabled us to escape before he reached our table.

Mother’s Day still isn’t high on my list of important holidays, but this year it was more fun than I remembered, with baseball and strawberries and bike tune-ups done without asking. Too cold for swim shows this year, I’m afraid. But I suppose with the current rate of global warming, it’s not out of the question for next.

Valentine's Day, redux

Just the words “Valentine’s Day” conjure up for me the taste of dark chocolate cupcakes made from a Betty Crocker cake mix, topped with thick sweet vanilla frosting and a sprinkling of grainy red sugar or a cinnamon heart. More than cards, flowers or candy, my most evocative Valentine’s memories come from grade school parties: the novelty of getting to eat sweets in the classroom, the break from routine.

My kids don’t know the pleasures of chocolate cupcakes and sugary frosting in the classroom on Valentine’s Day; food and drinks are no longer allowed at their school celebrations. They don’t know what they’re missing, but that’s not a bad thing, because they think Valentine’s Day at school is plenty of fun just the way it is. Holly spent hours this year making Valentines from heart-shaped pieces of shiny pink and red card stock: she glued sequins and stuck stickers to each one, then wrote her classmates’ names on them, signing each boy’s card “From Holly” while each girl and teacher got “XO Holly.” When she’d finished writing cards for the 18 students and two teachers in her class, she made a half-dozen more for good friends in other classes and past teachers.

Tim, who hasn’t been interested in Valentine’s card exchanges for years, took a different approach this year: he commissioned an original piece of Valentine’s artwork from a close friend known to be a talented artist and gave just that one card. (Shades of Cyrano de Bergerac, I realize, except that no one will mistake Will's artwork for Tim's.) His artist friend charged him $3, which Tim admitted at bedtime last night he hadn’t yet remembered to pay.

I gave Rick and the kids each a small box of chocolates; Rick brought flowers home from work for me. For once, I didn’t pester Holly to clean up the mess her crafts project left in its wake; we can deal with stickers, sequins and trimmed scraps of paper today. With or without cupcakes (though I admit I love cupcakes), Valentine’s Day is such a fun holiday to celebrate. Yes, it’s a day for love, but also for the good cheer of sweets and bright warm colors and silly poems on cards. It’s a holiday that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and yesterday was a great day to throw ourselves into it once again.

Secular reflections on Advent

Advent in the religious sense was not a concept I was familiar with as a child. I knew about advent calendars – my sisters and I shared one every December, some years with pictures and some years with chocolate – but I thought they were just a way of literally counting down the days to Christmas, meting out the excitement and anticipation. This made plenty of sense to me; I can also remember years when my sisters and I counted down the hours until our birthdays on the day immediately preceding it, and this felt the same, though on a different timeline.

Only recently did I come to understand, or at the very least catch a glimmer of understanding of, the genuine symbolism of Advent. When my children and I started attending the Unitarian Universalist church here in town about seven years ago, I heard the words spoken over the lighting of the advent candle each of the four Sundays before Christmas, and understood for the first time that Advent wasn’t just counting down the days until Christmas burst on the scene but rather a profound observance of waiting, hope and expectation.

This year, Holly and I were invited to be the Advent candle lighters for the very first week of Advent. Holly lit the candle, while I read the traditional words: “We light this first candle for the Hope of Advent. May it kindle in us hearts full of expectation.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about the meaning of Advent ever since that last Sunday in November. The weeks before Christmas do indeed have such a sense of wondrous expectation. There’s still the spirit with which I understood Advent from the advent calendar when I was Holly’s age, of course: the wondrous expectation of Christmas presents – both giving and receiving – and the arrival of Santa Claus. And at the other extreme is the wondrous expectation of devout Christians: awaiting the birth of their Savior. But many of us fall between those two endpoints. We are waiting to see how our holiday expectations may or may not be met: whether the family gatherings or vacations will go as we hope, whether the parties will be as merry as planned, whether the meticulously purchased or crafted gifts will be received with delight. Some are waiting for the return of a family member: from college, from far away, from military service. In the case of our minister, whose first grandchild was born earlier this week, the Advent was literal this year: she and her family were joyfully awaiting a birth as the weeks of Advent unspooled.

To me, the air itself feels full of quiet waiting. Not necessarily waiting for something wonderful and thrilling, but for something unknown. It’s been very cold this week, and there’s no snow: the ground is hard and amazingly still. The earth seems to await snow, in the same way that there are people right now awaiting news, information, reasons for optimism, answers. And it confirms that the process of waiting can be in itself a spiritual act.

Contemporary spiritual writer Edward Hays, author of A Pilgrim’s Almanac, wrote this: Life is a constant Advent season: we are continually waiting to become, to discover, to complete, tofulfill. Hope, struggle, fear, expectation and fulfillment are all part of our Advent experience.

Yes: that’s true all year long, and for the four weeks preceding December perhaps most notably. The earth where we are right now is still, cold, and quiet, and there are many things to anticipate, to await, to wonder if they will arrive.

It takes a child (or several) to raise a village

To be sure, there is wisdom in the adage that it takes a village to raise a child. But last night at Carlisle’s Christmas on the Common, I couldn’t help but think it also takes a child to raise a village.

For the past several years, I’ve been on the serving crew for this annual event, meaning that I arrive early and help arrange cookies on platters and get the hot chocolate urns in place. While the audience is outside singing Christmas carols, admiring the town tree and awaiting Santa, I start pouring hot chocolate into Styrofoam cups to be ready for the crowds as soon as they pour in after Santa’s arrival by firetruck.

I used to feel important in this role. Not only did it involve the aforementioned tasks but also overseeing a small team of grade school aged children who every year asked to “help” at the event. Part of the work of the small crew of adults present was to supervise and oversee these young helpers.

But last night, I noticed something: the helpers I’d been working with for the past few years can pretty much run the show on their own now. They no longer need adult supervision and instruction; in fact, they no longer need adult assistance at all. Middle schoolers now, they know the ropes.

So they do their part by providing labor for the event, and the little kids, the grade schoolers and preschoolers and toddlers, do their part by adding enchantment to the evening. They stare at the tree, sing the carols, and watch with mouths agape as the processional heads up Church Street: first the police cars with blue lights flashing, then the antique fire truck, with Santa waving and his five elves posing. The kids cheer and yell, and then they pour into the church hall for hot chocolate and cookies and photos with Santa.

It’s a quintessential old-fashioned small-town event. Everyone who attends has a wonderful time, and it’s the kind of evening that underscores the ways in which Carlisle can sometimes – though not always – feel like a cozy village. But these events wouldn’t occur without children present, the younger ones and the older ones alike. So in that respect, it takes children to raise a village.

I don’t mean to suggest that communities without children don’t have their own rituals of cheer. Retirement communities, subdivisions restricted to adults, college dorms, even nursing homes and graduated care facilities: they too have their times of merriment. But in a case like this, it’s the children who bring the community together. During my stint serving hot chocolate alongside the middle schoolers who were really doing most of the work, I saw among the revelers three adults who do not have children. In a small way I was surprised they attended, but also not; it was a jolly evening for everyone. But it made me think about how the presence of the children had drawn out even these non-parents to join in the fun.

So it takes a village to raise a child, and it takes children to make a village. Community, in the most meaningful sense, happens best when all ages work together. Last night, that included babies to be admired; little kids thrilled by the holiday mood; older kids happy to help out (and happy to posture for each other as they did so); adults to pull it all together. At times like this, we are a community with the spirit of a small-town village. And sometimes it takes children to make that happen to its best potential.

Another year's holiday concert reminds me of how much music matters to the holidays

I hadn’t thought much before yesterday about the role of music in the holidays, but at some point during last night’s holiday concert at church, or maybe earlier in the day when I was listening to liturgical Christmas choral music on the radio while driving, I thought about how music was once considered one of the holiest ways to mark the presence of the spiritual and the belief in the Divine. The early Christian choral music I heard on the radio was written out of a sense of profound celebration. Music isn’t merely an element of entertainment marking holiday gatherings, I then remembered; it is in fact considered a means of expressing witness to the Divine.

The church concert last night included some elements of early Christian music and some elements of the more popular forms of holiday music: standard carols, jazz arrangements, a run-through of Jingle Bells that included all the children in the audience shaking various forms of percussives. It was a wonderful program, just as it is every year, and as I sat there I was conscious of the ways in which the concert carries its own set of milestones and markers of the passage of time. Two 13-year-old girls sang a duet beautifully, and as I listened, I could remember one of them singing in the family choir back when she was a kindergartner, and her earlier solo performances when she was 7 or 8, but I could also remember the very same duet she sang with a friend last night being sung years ago by a young woman who now attends a performing arts college program in New York. I remembered choir members and instrumentalists from years past who have died or left town, and sitting next to our minister reminded me of her predecessor, who loved holiday observances including this annual concert and died prematurely soon after leaving our parish.

But I also remembered how my own family has changed in the years I’ve been attending this annual concert. When we first moved back to town, I took Tim to the holiday concert with me; he was just three years old and a little too restless for my comfort. Holly came with me for the first time when she was two; something about the candles and the music had the effect of putting her into a sound sleep on my lap for the duration of the concert that year. The year after that, she and I had to sneak in and out of the Sanctuary at least three times during the one-hour program because she was at the peak of toilet-training, and it wasn’t going all that well.

Last night, there were other babies and toddlers whose parents were like I once was: far too preoccupied with keeping their small children quiet and calm to enjoy the program much at all. I knew how they felt, though: in those early years it seems so important to expose children to the special spectacle of live holiday music that you try hard to make it happen even when all evidence points to the fact that they probably just aren’t ready yet to sit through a program not specifically geared toward preschoolers.

But I’m at a different stage now. Tim opted not to come at all; at 12, his own interest in watching football overrules the novelty of being out at night, not to mention any priority on having time with Mom. Holly did come with me, but shortly after we sat down she moved to sit with four friends of hers. Suspecting that five 8-year-olds sharing a pew during a performance might not be such a good idea, I issued some stern words about behaving well; but I need not have worried; the girls all behaved beautifully, listening with rapt absorption except during the audience-participatory Jingle Bells, when they shook their maracas and bells along with all the other kids.

Some things haven’t changed; Holly still needed to leave halfway through to use the bathroom. But unlike during the memorable season of toilet-training, she slipped out on her own, after whispering to me where she was going; and upon returning to the Sanctuary three minutes later gave me a cheerful thumbs-up.

The experience reminded me that holiday significance doesn’t always appear where you most expect it. I would have expected to be most reminded of the passage of time when choosing our Christmas card picture, perhaps, or in selecting gifts for my kids, or maybe even in what we chose to do on Christmas Eve. (Do we still have to leave out beer and cookies for Santa? Really? Even though it’s just more dishes for me to wash?) I wouldn’t have expected being an audience member at a concert to have so much meaning to me. But the concert was wonderful as always, and meaningful as always. And I will try to remember in the future that music deserves a prominent role in our holiday traditions.

Fifty photos for fifty cents (and lots and lots of memories)

Maintaining my photo album is yet another one of those things that I know I should make a regular habit of, but it always falls in priority to the point where it doesn’t get done. Compared with keeping up the house, completing paid writing assignments, or playing with my children, it’s just too far down on the list. Back in the days of print photography, I was much better about it. I’d finish a roll of film, send it off to get developed, winnow through the packet of prints that came back, and slide the one I deemed worthy into the plastic album sleeves. When friends admired my well-organized albums and admitted they stored their packets of prints in shoeboxes, I felt a little bit superior.

But after I started using a digital camera, my good habits fell by the wayside. It’s so easy to just store electronic files and promise yourself you’ll print them someday. After all, you know they’re right there on your hard drive (and we all know what a safe place that is, ha ha. I frequently remind myself that storing files on my hard drive without backing up is like putting a mug of coffee on the roof of the car while I help the kids with their seatbelts. Maybe it’ll still be there when I remember to retrieve it, and maybe it won’t.)

So when Kodak ran that memorable ad for photo printers with the line “Mothers, don’t let your babies grow up to be pixels,” I knew they meant me.

Still, it’s hard to keep up. I don’t have my own photo printer, so I need to send my photo files out to be printed, and without the standard unit count of 24 that we all became accustomed to with film photography, I never quite feel that the time is right to print.

This year I came up with a different approach – the opposite of the keeping-up strategy that I used back in the film days. I kept procrastinating on ordering pictures although I had them all organized by month on my computer, and then right after Christmas I received a promotional email from Snapfish advertising 50 prints for 50 cents. Not only did it seem like a good deal even with shipping costs added on; I liked the idea of choosing the 50 photos that best reflected 2009 for us, although I wasn’t averse to paying a few cents more if I couldn’t winnow it down to 50.

Once I’d chosen, it actually came out to 54, and by the second week in January, the packet of photos had arrived in the mail. I happened to be going away over the weekend, so I took a newly purchased album and the photos with me, and a mere two hours on Saturday afternoon was all it took to get The Year in Pictures all wrapped up.

And I have to say, I’m delighted with the results. It’s not just a matter of feeling organized. Putting a year’s worth of pictures in an album has the effect of giving the year a certain shape and form that it didn’t necessarily have in my mind previous to this representation. On the one hand, it’s not an original observation to note that in family photos, everyone always looks happy and harmonious; no one (except maybe art students) takes pictures of family fights or boring rainy afternoons.

But it’s not just that. Seeing our year reflected in its most photogenic moments reminds me that even though every year has ups and downs, disappointments, disputes, illnesses, frustrations, we also had a lot of really great times during the past twelve months. There were the obvious and unforgettable ones, like our five-day trip to Florida in late February: look at the kids building a sand castle together on the beach and taking a ride at Busch Gardens. But there were those that we might forget without a commemorative photo as well: the June afternoon when Tim and I went running with Tim’s fourth grade teacher; the morning Tim and his friend Will fed the cows and sheep by themselves; Holly reading a picture book to her two younger cousins on Easter morning. Halloween costumes and Thanksgiving feasts: of course we’d remember that those holidays took place, but the pictures remind me that these annual observances have unique hallmarks from one year to the next: Holly marching in the school parade hand-in-hand with her friend Samantha (a monkey and a witch, together at last – why not?); Tim and three friends savoring a nothing-but-bacon breakfast at the end of Tim’s birthday sleepover.

And while I might have ended 2009 with the overall sense that we didn’t do much in the way of family travel last year, the photos remind me of all the many smaller excursions we took: the Boston Harbor Islands on a hot August day; Bath, Maine, for the Fourth of July; Pennsylvania during April vacation. True, I always feel like I don’t see my sisters and their families enough in the course of a year, but the photos remind me of the good times we managed to fit in with them: playing basketball in Swarthmore; a spring tea party over Easter weekend; an afternoon of tiara-making; an anniversary dinner which featured the most elaborate baked Alaska I have ever seen, made by my sister Lauren.

Maybe it’s just to excuse future procrastination, but in a way I like this approach: wait until the year is over and then compile photos from the entire twelve months. Yes, it sanitizes things by eliminating all the not-so-memorable times. But it also reminds me that if we‘re as fortunate as we were last year, we have plenty of good times to look forward to in the next twelve months.

One great run

On Saturday, I finally broke out of my one-mile running rut. Each winter, as soon as we get measurable snowfall, my running routes become more restricted because the footpaths don’t get cleared, and although running in the roadway isn’t out of the question, it doesn’t work with the dog on leash, and it’s feasible really only in broad daylight and not during rush hour. So the recent snowstorms have kept me running up and down our (fortunately long) common driveway and logging barely over a mile per run. Before starting the running streak, I didn’t even bother to run in the winter once the snow fell; now I often do only the minimum one mile necessary to maintain the official streak.

On Saturday, though, enough melting had taken place that the roads were down to bare asphalt, and I guessed there would be little traffic, so I took the dog and headed to a nearby neighborhood, and it felt so great to be out running a normal distance again. It was a gray, raw afternoon. No precipitation was falling but the air was damp, the temperature in the high 30’s, and although I always claim my favorite weather for running is the end of a hot summer day, in the past couple of years I’ve come to realize that physically, there’s actually nothing more invigorating than a day like Saturday; there’s something about the cool damp air that feels so good to inhale. After all the time indoors on Christmas Day, all the rich food, all the sitting around (at parties, in the car, at home afterwards when we were worn out from celebrating), it was the most wonderful feeling to be out running in the cool air.

I was listening to a podcast of “Science Friday” in which Dr. Julie Holland (“no one but my mother actually calls me Dr. Holland”) talked with Ira Flatow about her memoir depicting her years as director of emergency room care at Bellevue Hospital. Again and again, she returned to the theme of spending time outdoors as an essential factor in mental wellness – she actually thinks she might see more mental illness working in New York City simply because it can be harder for people to spend time outside – and her words dovetailed so beautifully with how I was feeling on that afternoon as I ran.

Bill McKibben wrote in Hundred Dollar Holiday: The Case for a More Joyful Christmas that what most people crave over the holidays is more quiet time and more time in nature, and as much as it makes sense that those should be elements of the holiday, it can be so hard to fit in solitude, quiet, and walks in the snow amidst the parties, baking, wrapping and errands. Saturday’s run, at 3.1 miles, restored my spirits more than anything else could have. The time alone, the time in the fresh cool air, the exertion, and the fact that it was the first time in a week that I’d run for more than 15 minutes at once got the week after Christmas off to a healthy, rejuvenated start for me, and I was so grateful for that half-hour of running.

Holiday cards: Who doesn't like photos of their friends' kids?

Christopher Muther wrote this essay in today’s Boston Globe stating an opinion that was new to me: how he emphatically does not enjoy seeing photos of his friends’ children (or his friends themselves) on their Christmas cards. I understand that holiday cards in general have their detractors. There are the proponents of the voluntary simplicity movement who take the stance that composing, addressing and sending cards is one task a frazzled merrymaker could easily bypass; more importantly, there is the undeniable reality that the Christmas card tradition generates massive amounts of paper, ink, dye and other environmentally problematic substances.

Nonetheless, if you’ve make the personal choice that cards will be part of your holiday traditions, I can’t imagine anything I’d rather see than a photo of the sender’s children.

Among my cohort of parents, I find the bigger question is whether to include ourselves in the photos. My vote is yes. We have too many acquaintances whom we don’t get together with nearly enough, and I like to see how my friends are changing and aging just as much as I like to see what their kids look like from year to year (though my reason for wanting to see this might be different). On the other hand, it’s been ages since I practiced what I preached. The last time my husband and I appeared in our own Christmas card picture was the year before our second child was born. Back then it seemed to make sense for reasons of visual (and perhaps also symbolic) balance to have the photo include one mom, one dad, one child and one dog. Since my daughter’s birth, the card has featured the two kids. After passing 40, I found I generally wasn’t feeling all that photogenic anymore.

Not only am I different from Christopher Muther in that I love seeing photos of my friends’ kids but I also relish the variety in tastes that people display as far as what kind of photo they use. How are the kids dressed? How are they posed? What’s the setting? Was it an arranged photo shoot specifically for the purposes of this card, or did the parents just go back through their year of photos and pick out their favorite candid from a family vacation or weekend excursion? What’s their attitude toward seasonality: should a Christmas card have snow and evergreen boughs in the background, or is a shot of the kids at the beach or wearing Halloween costumes just as acceptable?

As for my family, our approach has been to set up a quick informal photo shoot a few weeks before Christmas. When possible, I wait for the first snow, because I like outdoor scenes but early December without snow on the ground is not a particularly beautiful time here; the scenery tends to have a lot of mud-brown and grayish overtones even on a sunny day. Since we live on a farm, for the past two years our picture has included a cow or two, which is a goofy but fun way of distinguishing our photo from the dozens of others like it that each of our friends probably receives. In fact, I think we’re the only people we know who usually include cows in our Christmas card photo. Our results are adequate from an aesthetic standpoint: not as picture-perfect as our friends who go in for professional photo shoots, but better than the year that we ran out of time and simply dropped ourselves into a quick photo-ready pose before leaving the house to attend a Christmas party. (Unfortunately, we neglected to give much thought to background. “Nice picture of your humidifier!” my father commented that year. That might be why now I always go for outdoor shots.)

Actually, the most inspiring idea I’ve had about Christmas cards is what to do with them after Christmas. Each year I buy a mini photo album, the kind that holds just one 4x6 per page, and use it exclusively for holiday card photos that people send us. When the kids were little, they had a great time flipping through the albums to see whom they recognized, and they still enjoy glancing through the albums to find long-outdated photos of their friends.

And as for our friends and relatives who prefer etchings of winter scenes or religious imagery on their Christmas cards, we understand that choice as well. Any card is a good card, from my perspective. Even electronic cards are fine. It’s December, and one of my favorite parts of the holiday season is hearing from friends: via photo, newsletter, or simply a word or two of greeting above their signature.