Christmas Cards

One of my favorite parts of Christmas is sending and receiving Christmas cards. I love when the mail comes each day and finding out who we've received cards from. Fancy photo cards and picture collages have become really popular in the past few years, and it's especially fun to get those. I would love to send those out for our Christmas cards, but my mom and I just aren't willing to spend $2 or $3 per card when we send cards out to about 80 people.

Sadly, it seems like sending Christmas cards is becoming a thing of the past This is so sad, because we love hearing from our friends! We seem to get fewer and fewer cards every year. And lots of other people have resorted to just putting a picture/newsletter on their blog and/or Facebook. That really isn't the same, though! (I'm only doing it because in addition to sending cards out, not in place of it.)

We took this picture on Thanksgiving and decided to use it for our Christmas card picture since we didn't have a lot of options to choose from. It's not the best of me (I look a little sleepy) but my mom and Chandra look great. 

My dad always wrote our family's Christmas newsletter when I was kid. After he died my mom started doing it, but I decided to take it over in 2006 so that my mom would have one less thing to worry about. I usually write about all of my married sisters, as well as Chandra, my mom and me, but this year I decided to make it easy on myself and just write about the two of us still here at home with my mom. I have to admit that writing a family newsletter sometimes gets a bit old since I feel like I say the same things year after year. Here's the short note I wrote for this year: