Christmas Cards, oh Christmas Cards

That has been the theme of my last two days, Christmas cards. I think I have mentioned in the past that we have a tradition of taking our Christmas card photo the day of our brunch. We continued that tradition this year (a little later in the day, but none-the-less). I finally remembered to bring my camera and cord into work on Tuesday and uploaded the photo of choice to snapfish and designed our card. Given we are an inter-faith family, I try to find a card that says Happy Holidays and doesn't have anything too Christian in design (like a Christmas tree). I was afraid to do the normal shipping so for the second year in a row I had them sent to my Walgreen's -- at least I thought I did.

I left work forty-five minutes early because it had snowed a bit and Cincinnatians are not very good drivers in bad weather. Thank goodness I did. It took me 35 minutes to get 1.5 miles due to an accident. After that it was smooth sailing but I barely had time to go to Walgreen's before relieving Kirsten. I ran in only to find they didn't have my order. I have been using snapfish long enough to trust them immensely, so I new I had made a mistake. The problem was I use my home email account not my work account, so I went home to check. Sure enough I had them sent to the next closest Walgreen's.

Thankfully my wonderful husband was on his way home and went there to pick them up (this is what I get for not doing it all on Sunday night like I normally do and trying to multi-task at work). That night Arnie and I put them into the envelopes, got return addresses on them and I began to address them. I got through about 50, the other 130 got done tonight. In total about 3-4 hours spent on our cards. I love doing it and thinking about all the people we are sending them to and what they mean to us.

From family, childhood friends, high school friends, college friends, grad school friends, work friends, neighbors and more. They span over 40 years of relationships. It also makes me think about our wedding, as many of them were there with us. Also because I still use that address list. I have never been taught to do an address list online, so I do the old fashion way of keeping them all in a folder and writing them each year. I know this is incredibly inefficient, but have never gotten someone to show me how to do it on the software we have. Maybe a new years resolution for 2009.

So now they are stamped except for about 40. I am taking a 1/2 day tomorrow so I will go to the post office for some more stamps. Hopefully our family photo will bring a smile to some faces and bring back fond memories from the past, as sending them did for me.