In a week full of hectic obligations, I had something to look forward to: one of the obligations came with a side dish of a night all by myself in a motel and then a planned repeat of my cherished breakfast at IHOP. But then it was ruined by weather. Well, I still had a nice time: the driving part BEFORE the weather was unusually terrific, and nobody tailgated me, and I got good postcards at a rest stop, and I was in a great mood, and the ice cream machine at McDonald’s was working (?????) and so I got a hot fudge sundae, and I had a lovely time playing and winning the “Pop song or CHRISTIAN pop song?” game.
The last time I mentioned that game, someone signed me up for alllllll the Christian newsletters, which I think is the wrong answer if you want to be competitive in the “What Would Jesus Do?” game. DO we picture Jesus huffing off to his computer and simmering in the delicious spite of signing someone up for a bunch of junk mail? Or do we picture him saying “Ooo, ooo, my turn, my turn, I want to guess this one!” Twice I heard that new Harry Styles song and thought Jesus would be fooled by that one FOR SURE.
Harry Styles: “Walk in your rainbow paradise…”
Jesus: “Oh, yes, that is DEFINITELY one of mine!”
Harry Styles, continuing: “…Strawberry lipstick state of mind…”
Jesus: “Oh My Father God, WHY AM I SO BAD AT THIS”
Swistle: *smugly adds another tally mark to her column*
I have not yet done my Christmas cards, and I do not like to be last-minute about cards, and also I LIKE doing cards so this is perplexing. I addressed the envelopes a number of weeks ago, but I seem to be having trouble writing the cards and putting them into those envelopes. Part of it was that I ordered photos from Shutterfly because they’ll print text on the backs, which saves me from writing our names dozens of times; but they arrived and the text was truncated, so that they said “Thistle family, Christmas 2019: Elizabeth,”. Just like that, with the comma and then no one else’s names. So I contacted Shutterfly, and somehow this took an HOUR to deal with, and finally I had to ask for a refund because they said there was nothing they could do to make sure a re-order wouldn’t arrive printed exactly the same way, and they wouldn’t rush the redo or anything, so the replacement photos wouldn’t have arrived until tomorrow and still might have been wrong. And I think that experience sapped the life out of the cards project. I’d been so ahead of the game! Addressing the cards! Ordering the prints in plenty of time! And then: prints ruined, start all over. It was too much, apparently. Well. I need to rally. I will do it right now.
I wish Christmas wasn’t so thwarty. Every win is opposed by an equal and opposite thwart for me this year. Ah well. I’ll try again next year. Yep. That’s definitely going to be my year. I can feel it.
“DO we picture Jesus huffing off to his computer and simmering in the delicious spite of signing someone up for a bunch of junk mail? Or do we picture him saying “Ooo, ooo, my turn, my turn, I want to guess this one!” Twice I heard that new Harry Styles song and thought Jesus would be fooled by that one FOR SURE.
Harry Styles: “Walk in your rainbow paradise…”
Jesus: “Oh, yes, that is DEFINITELY one of mine!”
Harry Styles, continuing: “…Strawberry lipstick state of mind…”
Jesus: “Oh My Father God, WHY AM I SO BAD AT THIS”
Swistle: *smugly adds another tally mark to her column*”
Oh, Swistle, I CACKLED.
OMG…this is everything:
Harry Styles: “Walk in your rainbow paradise…”
Jesus: “Oh, yes, that is DEFINITELY one of mine!”
Harry Styles, continuing: “…Strawberry lipstick state of mind…”
Jesus: “Oh My Father God, WHY AM I SO BAD AT THIS”
Swistle: *smugly adds another tally mark to her column*
*Fist bump* I TOO have not done my cards. Sigh…
Oh, Swistle. I feel the thwarting SO HARD. It’s especially troubling that I’m losing joy in the holiday activities I generally enjoy…everything starts to feel like a chore and I could do without it. I blame the patriarchy in no small measure. I’m doubly sad because the majority of my children still believe in Santa and magic and these should be the golden Xmas years, and yet I just feel grinchier and grinchier.
For YEARS I have loved doing our Xmas cards. My handwriting is not up to addressing the cards except in an emergency, but that is why God invented mail merge and Avery labels. Until this year, when the burden of printing of said labels has become insurmountable, because of reasons. So I am fully prepared to spend whatever ridiculous amount of money it takes for Shutterfly to print the addresses on the envelopes for me next year.
Except perhaps they are less than trustworthy to print them correctly?! HOW CAN I BE PROACTIVELY STRESSED ABOUT NEXT YEAR’S CARD WTAF
On the chance that you have access to labels and a working printer and WOULDN’T feel that doing a mail merge would end in your eventual arrest (…that’s probably just me), maybe your non-truncated message could fit onto a label and you could slap that label on each card? Rather than writing them out?
Yours in thwartdom. Enjoy an extra large cocktail tonight.
I would note that to slap a label on the back of all the photos wouldn’t even require a mail merge, since they’d be all the same, so this is maybe an Extra Good Double Plus Idea. (you could even print them on something like gold-edged-but-can-go-through-the-printer nametags to pretend like you meant to do that?)
(to Auntie G.: sorry the mail-merginess is going badly. I did the spreadsheet-into-labels transformation for my husband’s grandparents’ Christmas cards for about a decade, and was fine with it, but I am a weirdo because I *like* mail merges and also spinach: see: weirdo.)
YOU CAN SEE THAT MAIL MERGE HAS ALREADY MELTED MY REMAINING BRAIN CELLS LOL
Yes, it would just be one repeated label, of course. I normally love the merge! But the margins get funkier and funkier for no reason I can determine, and printing options get harder, and messing up a whole sheet of labels is expensive and then IT’S TIME FOR BOURBON.
With labels, print off a sheet of your “labels” onto plain paper, then hold the printout up to a window (or other light source) lined up behind a sheet of the labels to see if they “go.” But I have no idea why the margins get funky; they should not be getting funky! Sorry.
I vote for leave the truncation and see how many people notice.
Sorry about the junk mail. How rude.
I am constantly CONSTANTLY thwarted in every day life tasks (as I’m sure we all are) and I try to use this to BUILD RESILIENCE (which I also harp to my children about).
Shutterfly cut off the bottoms of our cards, too! All we lost was the url to my blog, so we sent them out as is. I’m sorry you didn’t get satisfaction from customer service.
We have had TWO similar experiences with Shutterfly and thus no longer use them. I am very frustrated with them on your behalf. May I heartily recommend Mixbook for next time? Customizable, user friendly, good product, AND this year they shipped our cards a whole week earlier than we originally thought they would come!
Jesus would TOTALLY be a fan of that game.
This time of year is SO very trying – as we (mainly, mothers) are trying to “make it all happen” and remain “in the Christmas spirit.” It can make one crazy; particularly when the season (this year especially) from Thanksgiving to Christmas is so very short.
Man-Child just informed me that Christmas Eve is on Tuesday…HOW?! Somehow, I’d convinced myself it was Thursday. Everything has just been crammed into this weekend. *sigh*
The McDonalds ice cream machine working is reason enough to celebrate!!!!
The Christian newsletter thing is beyond the pale. Who does that?
I have been whittling down our cards list. It used to be 60-70. Then I decided no more cards to people who don’t send them to us – not out of spite, but just to make it more manageable. This year my husband announced we’re not sending anyone on his side cards. Well, I might still send one to his mom, but otherwise, I’m good with that. Down to about 20 cards per year!
So here is how I do it: I do a quick family photo shoot, pick the best one and get 4x6s made at Costco, and then slip them into the cards which I’ve written quick salutations and notes in. If I’m feeling ambitious I write the year on the back, but I figure if you know me well enough for me to think you’ll care about getting a family photo, you should know who all the people in the photo are. If I don’t think you’ll know who everybody is, you just get a card sans photo.
Swistle, I’m a big churchgoing Christian, and I laughed till I had a coughing fit over the pop song game. (I do think you’d win, but you have more practice than a first century Jew!)
I like the idea of sending the cards out as-is and seeing who notices. Maybe people will think Elizabeth is the Favorite Child this year and you’ve disinherited all the rest, like in a 19th-century novel.
Your Jesus dialogue is HILARIOUS! Who sent you those newsletters, damn it?! My mother in law sends us right wong Christian magazines and I call and cancel them. I wonder how she would enjoy a weekly subscription to the Inquirer.
I send out just under 200 cards. I include a lengthy but humorous recap of the year. People get super excited about it (or so they say) and I cannot decide who to eliminate from my list. Other than the obvious. We use Snapfish for cards and have never had an issue.
This year I inadvertantly used a photo with my son scooting into the shrybs to fit. As a result he looks like his leg has been amputated. A serious visual trickery that had us busting out laughing.
I’m stuck in a really weird glitch in the matrix situation with shutterfly. They keep resending the order I placed, they have so far sent it FOUR times, at RANDOM intervals and all in SEPARATE PACKAGES. But I don’t need FOUR PHOTO ORNAMENTS or FOUR TINY METAL PRINTS OF MY KIDS or even FOUR SETS OF PHOTO PRINTS and also when I call they have NO IDEA WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT. Additionally, the first package I received from them was an empty poster tube. Like a tube with…..nothing in it. Then TWELVE RANDOMLY INTERSPERSED PACKAGES and also, along with that, TWO PADDED ENVELOPES THAT HAVE CONTAINED NOTHING BUT A VERY TINY LEVEL.
Anyway I’ve been having my own very weird shutterfly problems this year.
I’m sorry this is happening, but it is making me laugh. A lot.
*right wing* not right wong. Channeling my inner Elmer Fudd.
It’s okay. It’s vewy wong for her to do that to you.
I saw this weird post secret entry recently where the person says they send religious cards to atheists and the atheists don’t have the balls to say anything about it. I love to receive cards from anyone that wants to send them and in any style they prefer because they were thinking of me and that is nice. I would hope no one is sending them to me to taunt me rather than share holiday cheer! I’m smacked in the face by Christianity pretty much every day of my life but it doesn’t matter, I believe what I believe and everyone else should do the same. So I guess my point is I have plenty of balls but don’t have the audacity of this person, who I believe would sign you up for newsletters! Sheesh! I hope you have a great Christmas, Swistle. Thanks for blogging, I really enjoy it.
Do they really think atheists care? Atheists don’t get their knickers in a twist about being wished Merry Christmas or whatever, it’s the Christians that hate Happy Holidays. We are used to a world with religion, we’re not scared we’re going to catch the Jesus from anyone.
WT everloving F with the Christian newsletters? I can’t believe any regular reader would do that, but “Christians” are constantly surprising me, so… I am SO sorry about the night in the hotel which is one of the most delicious joys in life, but I admire your salvaging other small joys from the situation. Also, this is the third time I’ve seen the hitherto unknown-to-me term “mail merge” today, and I’m thinking I really should update my Christmas card technique. I am equally behind, btw, and also like sending them and also do not like sending them late. But there was surprise extra librarianing to be done, and I am really trying to abide by my “do what you can and let the rest go” mantra, so here we are. Sometimes I send the cards on time and the mailbox gets frozen shut and no one gets them until after Christmas anyway. Yay?