The Christmas card process has been quite a, well, process this year.

First there are the personal cards. I’m committed to it this year. COMMITTED. No more getting to December 20th realizing I haven’t even started them. Now, yes, truth is I’m on my third weekend of saying I’ll start them and then, in fact, not starting them.

But I’m still committed. I swear. It’s true.

Then there are the professional cards, and only one word describes this process and it’s “ugh.” Ugh.

My company decided that to cut costs and supposedly “show off our digital offering” that we would do HTML or e-cards. What?! Seriously?! Can you say TACKY? I don’t even know what to say because as many of you may know, the holiday card thing in DC is quite important. Who you send to, who you “forget,” how good and quality the cards are… it’s all ridiculous, I admit, but it is nevertheless a big deal.

And let’s just review what I do for my company: external communications. So as you can imagine, my list is quite large because sending out holiday cards is, well, externally communicating.

So after a conversations with my boss (who is also against the e-card idea) we decided I would just buy my own cards and send them out and charge them back to the company. It’s just not right to send someone an e-mail card – I’d be the laughing stock!

(And this is the space I would go on a thing about the “holiday card” versus the “Christmas card,” but I really don’t think anyone is interested to hear what we all already know – it’s kind of ridiculous, but it is what it is.)

So here is a preview!

For the personal card, well, you don’t get a preview because if you’re reading this and you’re one of my friends, you’ll see it in mail!

For my professional cards, however, I’ve ordered two from one of my favorite sites, TinyPrints.

The first is a Christmas card. Because TinyPrints is so lovely, you can change any of the text on the cards – so mine say something a little different than what you’ll see. I also changed some of the fonts. But it’s Christmas colors and a Christmas ornament, so… I went with it.

I bought 200 of these:

Next, we have the totally vanilla any-holiday-you-want-card. The Holiday card. You could do the little circles in different colors so I chose the green and blue (which you’ll see here), and also changed the font to a less script-like font, and also changed the text a wee bit.

I bought 100 of these:

So in total, I have saddled myself with 400 cards. 400. Honestly, I could maybe not sleep for a month and they wouldn’t get done – so no, I have no idea why I’m doing this to myself, but I am.
And hey, Merry Christmas!