Dec 7, 2018 4 min read

I did not say I wouldn’t put up a Christmas tree this year, but it felt almost as sad.

“I don’t think I’ll be sending Christmas cards this year,” I said to the farmer. He looked at me as if I were bagging out of, well, putting up a Christmas tree.

“You have to send them,” he said.

But I’ve given this a lot of thought. Mailed cards are expensive, for both cards and postage. And as my world has expanded, so has my Christmas list. Every year, I say I’ll limit my cards to just 40, but who gets crossed off? I’d find myself with two cards and envelopes left, and four people still on the list. Nobody should have to make those kinds of decisions during the sparkle season.

There’s another, probably bigger reason I’m ending the cards this year, and it’s my kids’ fault. Since my firstborn was a baby, I’ve featured a photo on the card – always the kids and usually a dog, but never me. Each Thanksgiving, I would get my son and daughter together and snap a few photos with the hopes that one would be pretty enough to send out.

That’s 23 years’ worth, and there have been some gems. My favorite was from a few years ago, when I dug up an old photo of my son and daughter at ages 2 and 5, bundled in winter clothing and sitting in a toy convertible. Fast forward to 2013, when the farmer bought a used convertible Corvette. You see where this going. The card featured a before and after.

I tucked two copies of that card into the safe, where I keep the cards from every year. Someday I’ll hand them over to the kids. If nothing else, the photos are a good documentation of how they’ve looked as they’ve grown up.

But this year, there will be no card, and it’s all their fault.

Thanksgiving Day I asked them to sit in a chair so I could photograph them. They whined. I asked again. They resisted. I demanded. My daughter said she wasn’t dressed for it. (Will somebody please tell me how it is that the smartphone generation can snap photos of themselves and everything around them all day every day, and when their mother asks them to sit still and smile for one snapshot, they can’t possibly?)

Things went on like that for long minutes before I finally gave up, consoling myself with the reminder that lots of my friends have children and they don’t send photo cards every Christmas.

Besides, my kids are adults now. As they’ve grown up, they’ve been less and less interested in the Christmas cards and, in fact, don’t read this column any more. And why would they? Their lives are diverging from mine, as they should.

If this were just a matter of expense, I might send an e-card. But again, those kids wouldn’t sit for a photo. I am tempted to dive into that box of old photos in the basement and pull out, say, some middle-school photos that weren’t exactly their favorites. Put them on a card with a “Remember When” theme. That’ll teach them to put the kibosh on my Christmas card.

I’m not the only one, though. I get fewer cards every year. As I write this, I haven’t received even one yet. I understand, and it’s OK.

But we’ll never give up the Christmas tree. Ours went up last weekend – two of them.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.