Things That Loom Over Me, Part I

Okay, so Thanksgiving is over.  However, two big things are hanging over my head.  One the Christmas tree.  But that comes later and deserves a post all its own.  Before the tree looms The Christmas Letter.  When Cal and I got married, he said that he’d balance the checkbook every month if I wrote and mailed the Christmas card/photo.  (We took more pictures on Sunday—and we got a fairly decent picture. The problem is that not everyone agrees on which picture is acceptable. Ariel thinks that the best photo of her is the snorting/crazed* photo and is tired of having the worst picture of her chosen for the official photo.  She’s right. But usually we chose the one picture where Luke and Matt look normal...okay, and the one where l don’t look too old/odd.)

But back to the letter. I thought that when I agreed to do the Christmas letter that I was getting the easy end of the bargain.  (Actually, I think that the reason Cal volunteered is that he saw my checkbook when we got married—sometimes I added when I should have subtracted and vice versa.  I had a lot more money in the account than I thought.  Which was good, but as Cal pointed out it could have gone the other way.  That wouldn’t have been so good. Can you see now why it’s so odd that I have math kids?) 

Sorry—another digression. Back to the letter. I thought that I was getting the easy part of the bargain, but that was before we had children.  Now I have to write a rough draft and present it to all the kids.  Each one insists on “approving” what I say about them.  Actually, Luke doesn’t care.  So that’s easy.  Ariel doesn’t mind too much, though she says that I make her sound more wonderful than she is.  Jake isn’t too fussy—as long as his paragraph is as long as his siblings.  He hasn’t resorted to a word count, yet. Matt is the most hair-splitting.  He would prefer that I not include a paragraph on him.  Since I insist on a Matt paragraph, he gets to approve every word. I’m preparing my argument—sometimes we get down to the nitty-gritty of the connotations and denotations of various verbs.  Yep. Time to break out the thesaurus. Don’t you just wish you could write it?  I think I hear Cal laughing.

* see previous blog post