As part of being overwhelmed at Christmas – in the past – I have let the month go by and have not sent Christmas cards. For the friends and loved ones with email addresses, I have ended up sending a last minute note. Twitter and Facebook were not on my radar screen a year ago, so it would be easy to go that route and broadcast a message. But I am going to resist that urge and will send proper Christmas cards. Well, technically, it won’t be a card, it will be a picture with a hand-written note.

My husband, Robert, is diligent about sending out cards every year. We love photography (if you check out all of the pages on this site and my earlier blog posts, you’ll see some of our pictures) and for the second year he went online to Walgreens, of all places, and used a recent photo, this year from our trip to Arizona. We visited the Grand Canyon and had a nice picture that someone took for us with the Canyon in the background. Our message is to “Have a Grand Christmas.” We also put a picture of our newest addition to the family, Wilson the yellow Lab. Many of our friends in town and out of town have not seen him.

This entire process only took about 20 minutes and we picked up the cards shortly after that. So, this was quick, easy and now we have personalized Christmas cards. The tricky part is setting aside the time to send them! But we’ll make sure to carve out some time between all of our activities.

I hope this idea will get some creative juices going to bring more joy to the season.

“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulder. And he will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” – Isaiah 9:6