First published in the Tri Town Transcript Dec 8, 2016
By Esther C. Baird
Regular readers may recall that, a few years ago, I suggested we have a Tri-Town-wide bonfire where we’d toss our shimmery, smiling holiday cards into the flames and be done with it. It’d be a community-wide holiday card cease and desist. Each year, I wait, but so far there hasn’t been any take-up on my suggestion.
Still, I tried again.
“What if we skip the Christmas card this year?” I suggested to my family one Saturday.
This was met with an uproar. “We can’t skip it! So many people send us their cards, and we love to look at all their pictures. We have to send our own card!!”
Is that the royal “we”? Because each year I, the one actually doing the work, struggle. I have to cull through all the photos to find the ones that say we are happy and love each other, but also, we have our moments and are not perfect. We are flawed and often frazzled.
Yes, we had some awesome trips and vacations, but we also had a mouse that kept wandering into our family room during that week in October. Sure, we were all clean and outfitted one day last summer, but we also had that week when our daughter got a cut on her foot, which became infected, followed by an allergy to her antibiotics. I can assure you that our selfie in the ER wasn’t really Christmas card appropriate — but it was part of who we were this year.
“I can’t find the right pictures! And it takes me forever,” I declared. “How can I represent our whole year in one or two pictures? Plus, I keep seeing that same chalkboard background, and I’m sick of it! Also, I hate all the other backgrounds. We are not some distressed, reclaimed, barnwood table! We’re just a family!!!”
Sometimes moderation, in my moments of self-expression, is … lacking.
Our older daughter chimed in. “Let me make the card! I love using the photo programs!“
I looked at her, semi-annoyed because it was true. She created photo books and collages as if she was a natural-born graphic artist. But could she handle our family Christmas card with all its pitfalls and potential nuanced complications?
She spent about 30 minutes and declared she had three card options to show us.
That fast? No angst? No worry over including one location and not another? No inner turmoil over showcasing just the happy cheerful pictures? Nope. None. Her cards looked great.
My husband and I chose the one we liked the best, and I tossed her my credit card.
Done. We had a card with some cute pictures that showed us, as a family, doing some of the things we loved. No infected foot pictures. Apparently, she knew where to draw the line.
And then the cards came. Great shots. Nice card stock. Good size and then … no. NO!!!
A typo.
It was a missing comma. A comma that separated the girls’ names. Unless you lived in some alternate universe where we had one child with a double, Southern-style name, it was obvious that a comma had gone missing. This was no Oxford comma debate. This was an entire batch of missing commas that should be there under any grammatical structure.
Where had they all gone? How had this happened? Wasn’t there a writer in the family who could have caught this??
I said, wasn’t there a writer in the … oh, wait. Never mind. Look, I’m a writer, not an editor. Fine. It was my fault. I didn’t catch the missing comma.
But there it is. There is our flaw. It’s not as gnarly as an infected foot, but it’s also not perfect.
This Christmas, we are a family that is loving and happy but by no means perfect. It’s why, when all the Christmas dust settles and we’ve come down from our dizzying decorative heights, we know, in our family, that we celebrate the One who is perfect so we don’t have to be.
Whew. Comma. Exclamation point.