Christmas Cards

Why do some of us put so much pressure on ourselves to outperform ourselves? Why isn’t it good enough to just create something beautiful or fun and not worry if it is better than the last thing we did?

The answers to both of these questions respectively are: “Because you’ll die if you don’t,” and “if it’s not better, you might as well not do it at all and just take that barista job.” (Apologies, but if you’re barista-ing at the moment, we both know there’s something else for you that you are NOT doing.)

Right this moment, I am in a heated battle with my own ego over one-upping myself. I’m not talking about the blog by the way. I love doing this, but I don’t believe anything I do here is going to be a grand statement of who I am or a benchmark for others to measure me. Sorry.

What I’m talking about is getting my Christmas cards done.

(…)

That’s right. One of the more important artisitic statements I will make in my life is how our family does our Christmas cards. This year, the pressure is beginning to mount. Last year’s card was very good, but in my humble opinion, not as good as two years ago, and I REFUSE to backslide any further.

People talk to us all year long about our Christmas cards and how much they love them. When cards start rolling in at the end of November, many people remind us to send them one of ours. “Don’t take us off your list!” is a common desperate plea to make sure one of our cards has their name and correct mailing address on it. I’m not saying that we have to cut people every year, but I am saying that we have limited amounts we are able to create and send as now they have become rather cost prohibitive.

I guess this started with my mother, Sharon Damm and her annual holiday newspaper, The Damm Gazette. The Gazette is an annual holiday letter in the form of a newspaper and arranged into articles with pictures and bylines. Unlike many newspapers in this day and age, circulation remains rather steady and only dips when a subscriber dies. There’s very little advertising, so it only comes out once a year, but it is always filled with at least two or three full belly laughs (the equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize in the world of holiday letters). Several of us family members contribute stories and one year there was even a comic strip. The only time the Gazette was ever in trouble of folding was when the ancient computer program my mother used to put the paper together became unusable due to the computer containing it getting decommissioned and put on display in the Smithsonian Institutes technology wing between the abacus and electric adding machine.

It has always been brilliant, but when it came time for my young family to begin our own holiday letter tradition, my wife and I needed to do something different. Not better, the Damm Gazette is a Christmas classic like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” or “The Muppet Christmas Carol”.

Our solution was to do different themes each year and find a fun way to inform our friends about our fabulous lives while being creative and clever. It started out extremely enjoyable and still is, but now there’s this pressure to get the product to the people and now it is crunch time. Actually, a week ago it was crunch time. I can’t believe I’m typing this right now and not finishing up the project before we hit our Wednesday deadline for phase two of Damm Holiday Card 2012. In fact, pardon me for a few hours…

Yeah, I’m still not done. It has to happen though. We face incredible odds, but it WILL get done.

It has become rather taxing, coming up with fresh ideas. One of our first crazy cards was a four panel number of the family on the beach. The theme that year was “corporate annual report” with each quarter of the year addressing stockholders of our “Corporation” about what effected the “stock price”. The stock price was loosely based on household expenditures, like adding a new roof would be an investment in the infrastructure that would move the stock price down temporarily with hopes of future gain in the long run. Now that I read what I just wrote about the card, I hate the idea and I’m sorry I troubled you with it. It could have been so much better.

The next year, our brilliant idea was to do a broadway style playbill, with three acts to represent different parts of the year. We listed the players of course, and a brief synopsis of each act, and we listed song titles and who would perform them. Looking back, I like the idea, but again our pictures were at the beach and it doesn’t exactly fit the theme. We really should have done it right and rented out the Paramount for an afternoon and built a couple sets behind us that were family specific. It could have been so much better.

The next year we tried our hand at re-writing T’was The Night Before Christmas with some staged photos with Santa that had us with various playful poses with the Jolly Old Elf and now I laugh at the poem in spite of myself.  It could have been so much better.

The next year we went a little bonkers and created a holiday Christmas card that looked like a piece of junk mail from a credit card company complete with logoed envelope and cheesy marketing tossed in. We had little credit card sized magnets that we had our picture on and we affixed them to the “offer letter” as per mega-bank marketing play book dictates. The irony being that if anyone put those magnets near real credit cards, the real ones would be erased. Also, when you make your Holiday card to look, feel and smell like junk mail, people tend to treat them as such. I don’t know how many of our cards were thrown away that year, but in some cases, the joke definitely was on us. I still remember stuffing those envelopes and laughing about how crazy people would think we were when they opened them. I giggled like a ticklish hyena that night.

Last year we put together a large photo of the three of us with about twenty objects representing notable items from our year. Oscar and Gracie, our miniature dachshunds even floated above us to represent the ghosts they went as for Halloween. There were skateboards and drums and books and all kinds of things with little labels for each one. But that wasn’t the shocker.

What made my grandmother call me was the fact that we decided to put ourselves on the immediate inside left page without any clothes on (seemingly, it only appeared that we were nude as our shoulders up were bare and we had very surprised looks on our faces). She had received the card while her bible study was having lunch at her home and she wanted to show them all how clever and fun her grandson’s family could be. Little did she know she was about to show her respectable bible study some rare softcore holiday pornography. I’m lucky my grandmother had an excellent sense of humor or else that card may have given her 90-year-old ticker a reason to quit beating (I knew she had a pacemaker so we would probably have been safe, and we were).

To wrap up last year’s, we had the pose with all of our stuff set up and done in reverse, making it appear that my family just exists in a never ending realm of white backdrop. We don’t by the way, we’re people just like you. Just like you, only our Christmas cards are better. Perhaps I should say WERE better.

This year’s card still isn’t done and it’s our most ambitious project yet. As I paused from this blog to work on the project, I found myself giggling again. It’s a holiday giggle that tells me all the drama and work we’re putting into this is going to work. We’re going to get it out on time despite the work and intricacies. Next year I’m hiring an art director.

So no matter how egotistical or shallow you think I am for wanting to make our cards better every year, and you may have a point, it is our way of celebrating the holidays. If we didn’t love our friends and family so much, we wouldn’t spend so much time on the cards to make them like awesome little gifts that surprise you in the mail.

This is the NUMBER ONE thing that gets me in the holiday spirit. The idea that people we may not have spoken to all year, reach out and share their story or photo with us and we share ours with them, is a wonderful thing. It’s the caring and communication, the hug through the mail that lets people know that you still mean something to them. It’s that, and my family loves to make people laugh… and we’re ultra competetive with ourselve

My grandma would have loved what we’re cooking up for this year’s elaborate gesture. If I would have known last year’s card would be the last one she got, I might have saved the nudity for this year and gotten her this year’s card last year. I’m sure she would have redeemed herself to the bible study group.  I miss you Grandma and that’s the Damm truth.