Christmas Card: Don’t Let It Fool You- Ha!

From my family to yours, Merry Christmas! I’m grateful for each one of you.
I hope to provide some comic relief for you with this post and add a little chuckle in your day.

I absolutely love receiving Christmas cards in the mail! When my boys get home from school, we split up the cards evenly and open them! It’s one of our favorite things to do! With that being said, I thought it would be funny to do one of those spoofs on my Christmas card, like they do for the Restoration Hardware Catalog. I don’t want it to fool you! I guess it’s my little way of debunking the perfectionism and the high expectations I can get caught up in during the Christmas season. I can feel perpetually frustrated because my life doesn’t look like those cards and magazines I receive! I’ll have this deep feeling of inadequacy that will bubble up. I’ll think to myself, “we don’t seem as happy as these people”. For this reason, I find it hard to get ready for Christmas card photos. Because part of me is screaming, “This isn’t real! You guys never match! And you and your husband will feel so much pressure that inevitably you’ll end up annoyed at each other.”  And that’s exactly what happened….

Since I dislike the whole Christmas card rigamarole so much, I procrastinate. I know, really mature. So listen to how this went down. I didn’t get our outfits ready until approximately 40 minutes before we were to leave the house. Hello! Recipe for disaster! Just imagine this, I’m frantically running around to all of our closets picking out clothes that I think will go together and laying them on the floor. My husband comes home with the boys to clothes strung out all over our bedroom floor. I’m steaming clothes in the bathroom so they’ll look somewhat ironed. I have no make-up on, and I still need to curl my hair. This is the exact time we decide our boys need a haircut for the pictures. My husband gets out his clippers and starts giving our boys haircuts, and you can imagine how this went. Meanwhile, I’m still steaming the clothes and realize my hair isn’t going to get curled. Did I really think that was going to happen in the 40 minutes I gave myself to get ready? This is about the time I realize that I’m not sure I have shoes that “go” with my outfit. Wait, come to think of it- I don’t have shoes to go with my boy’s outfits either! That is precisely why the three of us are barefoot. Then I realize I have black toe nail polish on, which is not so pretty with my pink shirt, but I’ve run out of time! I still need to put makeup on! Ahhhh! So on the way to the photo session, while my husband is driving, I’m covering up my black toe nail polish with pink toe nail polish in the car! Oh yes, I really did that. We are tight on time and our freeway exit is closed. We finally arrive at our Christmas photo session, and I walk in barefoot because my pink toes are wet. You can just imagine the mood my husband and I are in at this point. I mean, did you hear what the last hour of our lives looked like? I’m exhausted just writing about it! If I think about it, it’s kind of a miracle that we had any pictures that looked good. But we persevered, and we’ll persevere next year because I absolutely love looking at my friend’s Christmas cards!

Anyway, just in case you have that deep feeling of inadequacy bubbling up at anytime during this Holiday season, just know that you’re not alone. I feel it, too. A little part of me always wonders what hilarious stories can be told from that picture day when I look at all the cards. Because let’s face it, getting ready for Christmas Card photo sessions is a recipe for disaster!  Here’s to having a more mature response next year. And here’s to realizing it’s nice to have cute pictures of your family every year, even if it’s a recipe for disaster and not the way you normally look. Ha!