Holiday Card Remix

Recently I did a rewrite of last year’s Holiday Card story for Babble.  It was supposed to run this week in their holiday edition, but got the axe at the last minute.  The “kill” money (which is a pretty sweet term to use when telling writers you’re not going to use their story-stab, stab!) should at least cover a bottle or two of nice gin, so ho ho ho, I’m giving you the story anyway, complete with embarrassing pictures and bonus commentary from my brother, John (the “oldest brother” in the story who hates taking the photos the most).  It’s worth the read just for his captions.  Have a Happy Hanukkah, a joyful solstice, a Merry Christmas and a fantastic Kwanzaa celebration, everyone!

Holiday Card

Ah, the Holiday card picture.  I doubt there’s a person born after 1841 who hasn’t been made to pose for one at some point in their lives.

Growing up my family’s holiday card picture often featured some sort of celebrity along with my brothers and sister and me.  We found an all too eager Indiana Jones impersonator in Disney World, invited ourselves into the home of the president of Notre Dame, posed with a guy who looked like Abe Lincoln, and so on. These cards were often signed from “Uncle” such-and-such, as if this person was a member of the family and wanted to extend his warm wishes to everyone on our holiday card list.  Ted Kennedy was elected to the Senate nine times and Buster Douglas overcame 42-1 odds to knock-out out Mike Tyson only to be called “uncle” by strangers wielding a camera.

When a famous person wasn’t available, a cheesy, and usually historical, setting was used.  One year the holiday card photo was taken at a Mark Twain festival in Hannibal, Missouri.  My brothers were dressed as Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, complete with cut off jeans (which were, of course, fashionable for deviant youngsters in the pre civil war era) and corn cob pipes, while both my sister and myself were supposed to be Becky Thatcher.  For some reason we had chalk boards (was Becky mute as well as prissy?) and frilly umbrellas.  Equally embarrassing was the photo taken in Colonial Williamsburg, where we wore tri-corner hats and marched down a cobble path with tin flutes and drums.  Merry Christmas from the 1700s!

And then there were what one brother calls the “annual dreaded Easter pictures.”  These were taken every year in Florida, after Easter Sunday mass when the humidity was at an all time high, it was well over one-thousand degrees out, and the glare from the white church, white sand, and white shell walkways was enough to burn out a person’s retinas.  There my entire extended family stood, with pit stains forming on our Sunday best, while photo after photo was taken.  Entire rolls of film were used each year on the day that the good Lord rose.  Every possible grouping of people was exhausted.  Eventually other families were invited to join in, and combinations of people that didn’t even remotely make sense were photographed.  Happy Holidays from the Mike Rossi Family!  Happy Holidays from the Mike Rossi family plus Uncle Jeff!  Happy Holidays from the Mike Rossi Family, minus Abby, plus the two decrepit people from the pew in front of ours, with Father What’s His Face in the background!  Happy Holidays from Amy and this street sign!  By the time the holidays actually rolled around, these torturous pictures had been forgotten and we were made to do it all over again.

As we got older, the celebrities and exotic locations dwindled, but the pain of posing remained.  We were told to stand next to each other and smile at graduations, weddings, and funerals (no less than three deaths in the family have been turned into opportunities for holiday card pictures–Great Grandma’s dead: Feliz Navidad!).

One year we were given colorful scarves and hats that were “on loan” from the Gap and told to hold on to a strand of Christmas lights, as if the camera caught us on the way to hanging five feet of twinkling Christmas cheer on the front of the house.  It wasn’t until the first round of cards was sent out that a friend pointed out the price tags that were visibly hanging off the hats and scarves that my mother had promptly returned after the photo was snapped.  My mom spent the day removing the scarf tags by cutting the bottoms off of the remaining cards.

My oldest brother reached the breaking point first and lead a revolt against the Christmas card picture, which resulted in yet another mutilated card.  All my poor mother wanted was a nice family photo.  What she got was a picture in which each of her rotten kids was giving her the bird.  The bird was tastefully done, though–perhaps an arm around a sibling that partially hid what was going on, perhaps a lone finger sticking out of the pocket, perhaps a hint of something not very nice in the shadows.  To the best of my knowledge, no one even noticed our brand of holiday cheer until we finally pointed it out to my mom who, once again, spent the day cutting the bottoms off of the unsent cards (all the while day dreaming about cutting off four real ones, I’m sure).

Now that he’s thirty, my brother wages a more passive protest–he arrives an hour late for the family photo, sets his timer for thirty seconds, and is out of there when the allotted time is up, whether the camera has had time to focus or not.  He has his own kid to pose now, as do I.

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Flash forward to last year:

The day was warm, the sun was shining, and we were at Duke Gardens, where the leaves had begun to fall and the autumn flowers were in bloom. The conditions were just right to take a holiday card picture.  My husband and I didn’t have the idea until we got there, though, and as we looked the children over we realized Addison had a snotty face and Ella had chosen to wear a purple shirt, brown knee length pants over top of rainbow striped tights, and gold shoes that were missing most of their glitter.  Plus, the children wanted nothing more than to be in motion. Perhaps the conditions weren’t right after all, but God help us, we tried anyway.

As we walked around the gardens, Steve and I saw dozens of other families taking their holiday card pictures.  Children in corduroy and starched white shirts sat with their arms around each other.  They were smiling and no one was putting anyone else in a headlock.  Other families had found someone else to take their picture while mom, dad, and the gang posed playfully in a pile of leaves.  Sigh.  I knew such a picture was not in the cards for us, but against our better judgment Steve and I tried posing our children anyway.  My own kids aren’t old enough yet to be the jerks my siblings and I had become, but they are just as much a pain in the ass.  Ella stood still; Addison ran.  Ella struck a pose; Addison scaled a tree.  Ella smiled for the camera; Addison foamed at the mouth when we grabbed her kicking and screaming body and tried to sit her down next to Ella.

My husband tied down the children, and I tried sprinkling leaves from above so as to give the impression that they were magically falling all around my perfect family on this perfect fall day.  Rather than making a whimsical background for my card, my falling foliage only gave the girls the idea of throwing fist fulls of wet leaves at me.

We finally got Ella to lay down in the leaves and convinced Addison it would be fun to sit on top of her.  It worked, but Addison was more interested in jumping on her sister and putting leaves in her hair than looking at the camera.  When Addison rolled off and took off running toward a nearby stream and Ella started throwing leaves again, we finally gave up moved out of the way so that the family in matching red velvet pants and patent leather shoes could have some leaves to sit in while they smiled nicely for the camera.

That year we ended up using a picture of the children holding Christmas lights, just as my mother had once done.  Only instead of price tags hanging off clothes, my holiday card featured the oldest putting the youngest in a headlock, both of them ensnared in a tangle of Christmas lights.  I like to pretend that instead of screaming, they’re singing about mangers and tidings of comfort and joy.