Christmas Cards

Lately, I have found making our yearly Christmas card a little stressful.  When the Heinisch children were little, I always had plenty of pictures of the four of them to chose from on my camera roll.  I would pick out a fun one and Doug would come up with a caption for it.  We had a lot of really cute ones including one in front of the liberty bell where Brett said, "Don't blame me!  Cal cracked it!"  Another one had the picture of the older three peering through a cabin window with the caption "On the lookout for Heinisch number four."  I loved that a few years later we took the same photo, but with Cameron in the picture as well.  

As our children got older, we stopped having just the one photo of the four of them and went to a picture collage on the front of the Christmas card and a written update of our family's year on the back.  I always still included a photo of the four of them or even the six of us in some years, but there were also ones of Meg playing soccer, Brett in the play, Cal on the basketball court or Cameron at the golf course.  Those collages were easy to make as I had a ton of pictures of everyone as they were all involved in so many activities and they were all at home.

Last year I still had quite a few pictures as we had taken a trip together to Disney before the pandemic hit and I also got a really good one of the four of them on the back deck at Thanksgiving.  What made the 2020 Christmas card stressful was the shipping problems last December.  Thousands of items got lost in the mail and it seemed that every package was delayed.  The worst for us was Carl and Marina's gift, which took over three weeks to arrive to their home in Florida due to a detour in North Dakota.  Our Christmas cards fell victim to the USPS delays last year as well, but thankfully arrived by December 17th giving me time to mail them before the holiday began.

Because the issues of 2020 haven't gotten much better this year, Doug and I decided that we would pay for expedited shipping on any holiday packages that we ordered or sent in 2021.  We also decided to order our Christmas cards before Thanksgiving with the hope of getting them out a little earlier this holiday season.  I started working on the card yesterday and quickly became frustrated.  I realized that we hadn't all been together much this year.  We had seen the Heinisch children a lot, but whole family activities had definitely declined.  Once I realized that I wouldn't have a photo of the six of us or even the four Heinisch children, I had to come up with a different plan.  I could either find individual pictures of each, take a group photo at Thanksgiving or find pictures of the Heinisch children in pairs.  I knew I didn't want to wait for a Thanksgiving photo.  Cal and Cameron were participating in "No Shave November" and it wasn't quite the look I was going for this holiday season.  I also didn't have a lot of individual photos to chose from either.  I did joke about using a picture of Cameron with each of us in the collage as I had plenty of those, but in the end went with the pair idea and it looked perfect..  I made two cards and had everyone preview them.  It took a little bit of editing, but in the end we found something that we were all happy with for this year's Christmas card.  Now the only stressful part will be waiting for them to arrive.