Christmas Cards

Christmas Cards

Noel Laflin

11-27-17

The first Christmas cards have begun to arrive.

Inevitably, there will be those filled with smiling family members, and updates on the latest travel, achievements, graduations, marriages, passing’s, etc.

My mom and dad were into homemade cards – back in the day.  It became a family project what with all of the cutting, pasting, typing, and hand addressing of all those envelopes.

One year, we all traipsed off to the Silhouette Shop on Disneyland s Main Street in order to have our portraits made.  I wanted to stay the day of course, but that didn’t happen unfortunately.  We had to go home and start making copies of our new silhouettes.  Then we all had to sign or print our names beneath our individual portraits.  I must have been about seven or eight at the time, so my printing was pretty horrendous.  It hasn’t improved much over the years, according to family and friends.

Another year, my dad and I scoured the city looking for miniature harmonicas that were to be tied, ever so tediously, with red ribbon to each card.  As the harmonicas were only about half an inch long, they did not carry much of a tune.

I recall a card where the latest family achievements were typed out in the form of a Christmas tree.  Now, that took some doing on the part of my folks.  It probably fell to my dad to do all that typing as he was a whiz on the old family upright Smith Corona.

But at some point in time, the homemade family card production went out of business.

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I just came across a snap shot taken a couple of years back at my brother’s house.  I remember sharing it in an email with my sister-in-law afterward.

“Honey,” she responded in a follow-up email, “don’t you have any normal pictures of our family?”

“Sarah,” I replied back, “this is as good as it gets.”

Now, I understand why we rarely used family photos on all of those homemade cards.