I Guess “Christmas” Is Passe?

Recently, a large chunk of my time has been spent searching for Christmas cards. Halloween and Thanksgiving kind of got the blow-off from me this year, so I’m determined to check off all the little to-do boxes relating to Christmas. For the past couple of years, I’ve been really anal and gotten my Christmas cards done by the weekend after Thanksgiving. (Well, signed and addressed anyway…sometimes they had to wait a few days for postage and actual mailing.) It’s now almost a week after Thanksgiving, and I don’t even have cards purchased.

Which leads me to the thought that I really can’t call myself much of an artist if I’m going out and buying pre-made Christmas cards. I should be whipping up some wondrous, creative piece of something and slapping it on a card to send out to all and sundry on my list.

It’s times like this that I have to remind that annoying part of myself that I actually work for a living and have a family to take care of. You know what they say about the shoemaker’s children going barefoot…apparently the same applies to artists.

Anywho…I did make an interesting discovery. Thanks to my mother (Hi, Mom!) I am incapable of sending a Christmas card that doesn’t say the word “Christmas”. If the card greeting says something about “holiday” or “season”, I can’t send it. (Though I do make an exception for “Peace on Earth” cards…especially during this particular war-mongering administration.) And during my recent search for cards, I discovered that the whole trend toward saying “Happy Holidays” means that finding a “Merry Christmas” card has gotten pretty dang tough. I don’t know why that really surprised me, but it did. (Well, “annoyed” is probably a better word.)

If you want to go with some religious artwork, you can find all kinds of “Merry Christmas” sentiments. But religious cards are so totally not me, that that’s not an option. I’ve got no use for organized religion the rest of the year; I can’t quite bring myself to engage in that kind of blatant hypocrisy over a card.

Speaking of cards that are tough to find, try finding an anniversary card for a still-married set of parents. My folks will hit their 38th anniversary in January, and while I’m happy for them, it does make it tough to get them a card. If they were divorced and re-married, the selection would actually be better.

But back to the Christmas cards...I did finally find a nice one, and while its greeting was about “the holiday season”, it also said “Merry Christmas”. And, it had cute polar bears on the front. I’m all about polar bears right now…but more on that later.

Oh, and in case anyone was wondering…the reception went fine, and I didn’t have to spend quality time under the bed with Mr. Hub. (Much to his disappointment.)