Merry Christmas!

Welcome if you found the blog via the Christmas card.  If you are wondering why, exactly, you got a Christmas card before Halloween...

For about 10 years I made all our Christmas cards by hand.  We sent out around 125 every year.  To make this work, I got in the habit of ordering supplies no later than Halloween and generally aimed to have supplies BY then.  I tried to have them made by Thanksgiving and mailed shortly after.

I pulled this off with baby Charlie.  I managed with baby Megan.  Card designs got a little simpler.  I came to the conclusion that a handmade card meant that the inside personal notes could be on the brief side.

Then we had Noah.

3 children is apparently my limit for 125 handmade cards.

Christmas of 2010 saw us send out our first photo card- everyone wants to see pictures of the baby anyway.  I stuck with the Halloween/Thanksgiving plan which worked well.

Fall 2011 saw me wake up in a panic for 3 consecutive nights about not having a family picture for the Christmas cards.  I decided this was a clear indicator that the time had come to cry uncle on Christmas cards.

That brings us to this year.  I've done that Halloween order deadline thing for 12 years now.  It's sort of a deep habit at this point.  Tinyprints offers a shipping option where they print the addresses on the envelopes, slap the stamp on and mail your cards directly to the recipients.  This is really handy when you are facing international postage x93.  Kudos, also, on their very prompt service.  They were efficient last time but were positively meteoric this time.  I guess demand for Christmas cards isn't so high in October.

Merry Christmas is pretty much the same as Happy All Saint's Day, right?