holding all the cards

i absolutely adore christmas decorations.  we haul our boxes out of storage each year on the day after thanksgiving, chomping at the bit to get them out and festivate the house.  (i totally just made up that word.  i think i like it.)  i love the electric candles flickering from the windowsills, the wreaths hanging on the doors and windows, and the fresh holly and stockings on the mantel.  i even look forward to hand washing my christmas fine china and crystal to display in the dining room -- which is saying a lot since i hardly ever hand wash anything.  this is why we start the season relatively early; not only do i just love the mood set by all these decorations, but it takes so much dadgum time and effort for us to get it all up that i want to enjoy it as long as possible.

but as soon as new year's day hits, i'm over it.  the boxes are back out and ready to be repacked, soon to be bursting at the seams with the new additions that inevitably come via neighbors, friends, and school art projects.  i find myself eager to start fresh, freeing the tabletops from their nutcrackers and angels and manger scenes, and regaining the much-needed floor space that's been held hostage by the christmas tree for the past five weeks.  and when the kids finally depart for their first day back at school, i look around at my newly uncluttered, empty house, and breathe a small sigh of relief.

but it's january 11 -- a week and a half past the moment that we closed the storage room and bid a fond farewell to our seasonal stash -- and there's one big project i have left to tackle.

 

it's our christmas card collection.  all 76 of the picture ones, anyway.  with our new house layout this year, i mulled over how to display them, and ultimately decided to just attach them to the doorways in the kitchen that lead into the dining room and breakfast room.  that way, we'd see them all the time.  sure enough, on any given evening as i'd cook dinner, i'd be peppered with questions from liam and susanna: "who's that?"  "how do you know them?"  "what's a sorority sister?"

i'm not totally sure why i've hung onto the cards for as long as i have.  perhaps it's the task ahead: for years i've stored them away in a huge photo album, trimming them down to 4x6 size and even going as far as arranging them alphabetically by last name.  i know i'm going to run out of room with this year's additions and will need to make a trip to a craft store to find another album.  (and yes, i'm aware at how this post is painting me in my most obvious type-A light.  i'm learning to embrace my dorky side.)

but i think that it's really that i just don't want to say goodbye.  the pictures of our friends and family have become, well, friends and family themselves.  they've sparked long-forgotten stories that we share with the kids, from descriptions of  playgroups in asheville (whose members, who at the time were tiny newborns along with liam, are now in the second grade) to recounts of trips chris and i made all over the country pre-children.  we've re-lived weddings and camps and college days to a surprisingly rapt audience over dinner each night, and i think it's given liam and susanna a truer sense of their place in our lives.  they might have thought that we really didn't exist before they came along, but they've started to see the larger picture.  they're beginning to understand how we're part of a larger community of people -- some whom we've known for decades, some whom we've known for just a few months, and still others whom we've known for so long that we don't even remember how we know them.  a community that's now represented on glossy photo paper and matte cardstock of various sizes, with return addresses from all over the continent.

tomorrow, i will take down the cards.  at some point in the near future i'll place them in an album -- although i've sworn to myself that this year i won't worry about alphabetical order -- and will store the album with the rest of our christmas boxes until the day after thanksgiving next year.  and on that day, we'll dust off the cover and flip through the pages, smiling at the 172 children (92 boys, 80 girls) smiling back at us, marveling at how many of them have grown.  and then we'll eagerly await the mailman's arrival every afternoon as we begin to fill our kitchen doorways with our community once again.