The Great Christmas Card Debacle of 2015

It's the most wonderful time of the year...holiday card time!! If you're anything like me, you love getting a stack of holiday cards in the mail every day. I love seeing all the card designs, the pretty pictures, the clever poems, the announcements about moves and births. I love seeing how big your kids have gotten; I love seeing photos from your vacation; I love that you took the time to send us a tiny piece of your holiday cheer. I display all the cards we receive in our hallway and the kids and I look at them and talk about them all December long. Holiday cards are one of my very favorite parts about Christmas!

However, getting holiday cards and sending holiday cards are two TOTALLY different things. Receiving holiday cards is easy and fun. Sending holiday cards is stressful and exhausting. The whole process of taking photos, selecting a photo, finding the right design, the right colors, choosing the right greeting, remembering to change the name of the family to your family's name!, committing, ordering, proofing, addressing, stamping and mailing holiday cards is enough to drive anyone to drinking (not that I need an excuse or anything). It's just really overwhelming.

Over the last few years, getting my act together and getting the cards out the door on time has been getting harder and harder. When Mac was a baby, I was all over it! I had 6,000 photos of him to choose from and sent a simple card with his big smiling face on it to everyone we knew, showing off our insanely cute baby. The next year I was newly pregnant with Mim and miserably sick and tired. I didn't book our photo session early enough and ended up with a late November date, which got snowed out and rescheduled for mid-December. By the time I got the photos back, ordered the cards, received the cards, got them addressed and stamped it was nearly February. I sent them anyway. Last year we hit the photography jackpot. We not only had an adorable family mini session done, we had photos from an extended family session that we loved and it took me WEEKS of agonizing over the photos and designs to finally pick a card. I was so overwhelmed with choices and the decision felt so momentous that I couldn't make a decision. By the time my husband finally intervened and picked ONE from the 37 options I gave him it was nearly Christmas. 

This year, I had a plan. I was on top of my game and booked a family photo session for early October, ensuring that we had plenty of time to get the photos back, order our cards and get them out well before the last-minute madness. All I wanted was ONE good photo of all of us looking at the camera and smiling. How hard could it be?! I had my amazing friend and personal stylist Dacy (from Mindful Closet) come over and pick out all our fun outfits, which I loved. I booked my other amazing friend and professional photographer Jessica (of Emma Constance Photography) to take our photos. Everything was falling into place!  Until it all just fell apart. 

(photos by Jessica of Emma Constance Photography)

I don't exactly know what happened, but our photo session was a total disaster. We were already running late that morning, when Mim pooped in the car on the way to the shoot, requiring a substantial clean-up and me having no wipes (WTF?). Then Mac decided to run absolutely wild and would not cooperate or get within 25 feet of us without hysterically crying. His pants kept falling down and we had to use a binder clip to keep them up. Ryan was exhausted, I was frustrated. We tried and tried and tried to get it together, but it just wasn't happening.

(photos by Jessica of Emma Constance Photography)

The kids were distracted, the parents were frazzled, the dog was ashamed to even be part of our family. The harder I tried to make it happen, the worse things would get. Bribery didn't work. Distraction didn't work. Silliness and patience didn't work. We hiked around the park, trying over and over. Mac fell down some stairs and had a meltdown. Mim tripped over every stick in a mile radius and had multiple meltdowns. The dog got loose and had to be chased. I had a meltdown. And guess what...after all that forcing, the photos looked...wait for it...forced!  Ugh.

(photos by Jessica of Emma Constance Photography)

Thankfully, my photographer is a really good friend and talked me off the ledge. She assured me that it wasn't just me and my kids weren't purposely trying to destroy my life. She told me every family has an off year and this was ours. It's normal. She reminded me that 3 and 1 are TOUGH ages and they won't be this little or uncooperative forever. She pointed out all the adorable shots that we did get of each of the kids individually and tons of great ones of each parent with the kids. She reminded me that we'll have these hilarious memories from the session and always look back on them and laugh.

And in the meantime, she agreed to come over to our house and try ONE MORE TIME to get that money shot of the 4 of us that would be Christmas card worthy...

And we screwed it up again! 

No really...we got some cute shots and a winner for the holiday card! But what kind of story is that?! Two months later and I'm finally over my sobfest about how my children are trying to ruin my Christmas (kidding). We got a great shot of the 4 of us (no dog this time) for the card and I set to work getting them ordered. After that ridiculous family photo debacle, I wanted the card ordering process to be as easy as possible.

I used Minted and was blown away with how easy they made it this year. You can sort by greeting (Christmas, Holiday, New Year), by how many photos you want on the front (0-3+) or by photo orientation (portrait, landscape, square). You can arrange by price, whether you want folded or flat, letterpress, foil printing and more. You can also upload your photo and see it/them directly in the cards while you're browsing! This was GENIUS. Minted has so many great options, but they were not so overwhelming that I couldn't decide. I narrowed down our decision by choosing a Christmas greeting, selecting 1 photo (landscape orientation) and picking a complimentary color. I think I got our selection down to about 12 that I loved and then went back to them over the course of an evening and made my final decision the next morning. Viola! I've included some of my favorites below.

Once you pick your card, you still get to customize it with more photos, text or design on the back, you can choose different edge types (rounded, scalloped, etc.), order coordinating labels and envelope liners. So many amazing options! 

I haven't sent out our cards yet, but tune back in a few weeks from now and I'll show you the final photo and holiday card design we chose.

Anyone else have holiday card drama this year?

*I received this product as part of the Savvy Sassy Moms Product Scouts program. All opinions are my own.