11/24/09 Smile for the Christmas-Themed Birdie!

Oh ya'll, you would be so proud of me! I have officially (and before Thanksgiving too!) ordered my Christmas cards. Eat your heart out, Martha Stewart!

Each year, we do the photo cards of us and the cats (quit rolling your eyes...lots of perfectly sane people send out Christmas cards of themselves surrounded by cats. Shut up! They do!) and each year it sneaks up on me and suddenly it's the second week of December and I'm snapping pictures like mad in an attempt to get something halfway decent to send out to friends and relatives (who no doubt receive these lovely tokens of holiday cheer and go, "Good Lord, look at all the cats. We need to have an intervention") but between all the shopping and the decorating and the Charlie Brown Christmas Specials on TV, the whole thing gets all frenzied and all the cards end up arriving two days before Christmas and I swear that next year, I'm going to get them out earlier.

Well, this year I have finally done it! (Okay maybe not totally since they aren't technically in the mail yet, but I have the pictures snapped and the prints ordered and I'll go pick them up tomorrow and as God as my witness, those cards will be in the mail before the first day of December!)

I credit my success this year on some essential changes in strategy. First of all, instead of trying to get the two of us and five cats all sitting in the same place at the same time and looking in the same direction without anyone making a weird face or getting clawed to little tiny bits like we've done in photos past, this year I went with the much simpler two photo option. One of us, one of the cats. Period. (Of course, that's not to say that it was a cake walk to get Tony smiling at the same time he was sitting up straight at the same time at I wasn't caught by surprise with the self-timer going off, or equally easy to get five cats who can either be best friends or despise each other depending on what day of the week it is to stand still for a picture, but I managed it). Then, instead of taking them in to Walgreens or CVS to fight with the little Kodak machine to edit and get copies made, I just did my editing at home and emailed them to the photo department. And finally, instead of just doing photos and then painstaking stuffing each one into a Christmas card and writing some note on the inside, I've upgraded to the all-in-one 4x8 photo card with Christmas message already included. Now all I have to do is pick them up from the photo place, address the envelopes and toss them in the mailbox for pickup! Viola! Instant Christmas cheer!

So bring it on, Christmas. I am so ready for you!

And by getting the cards out right at the beginning of December, friends and family will have an entire month to make crazy cat lady jokes.