Are the holiday cards arriving, with yours still on the to-do list? The task always sneaks up on me: two weeks ago was the time to start thinking about family photos if you’d like to mail one out for the holidays. But, in the midst of gift shopping and holiday decorating, here I am on the 20th of December writing this post for you. It may be too late for your holiday cards to arrive to your loved ones before Christmas this year, but that’s the magic of holiday season: it isn’t really over until the New Year comes around.
And with that in mind, it is still not too late for you to snap a picture of your sweet family and send it off before the 2020 ball drops. In fact, you may be better off for it with everyone already gathered around in one-place.
The truth is getting the perfect holiday card picture can be overwhelming: the dog isn’t loving the Christmas sweater you wiggled on him, one of your kids is insisting on wearing their Elsa-from-Frozen dress and refuses to take it off (cough-cough), and your partner is one long sigh away from retreating back into the house.
But there’s hope!
And these ten tips from San Francisco-based kids photographer Sarah Hebenstreit will help!
There was a wonderful story in the New York Times a few years ago called “The Art of the Out-of-Office Reply,” that detailed some of the variety of approaches people take to discourage a nasty pile-up of inbox messages using the out-of-office auto-reply feature.
I recognized myself in one of the more wishy-washy ones. (I.e. the “frank admissions that the person on the other end of the email is actually available in some way, just less likely than usual to respond to you.”)
But two alternatives really stood out. First:
For the Dallas Morning News book critic Michael Merschel, a recent trip was an opportunity to do many things at once with his out-of-office. The first few sections covered the usual territory, including a few admonishments about how and who to correctly pitch.
For recipients curious enough to continue scrolling down, though, there was a heartfelt explanation of the reason for his absence: “I want you to imagine a middle-aged man who fell in love with a beautiful baby girl almost 18 years ago, and now he is driving her to a gigantic college in a distant city filled with all kinds of people who do the things people do at college … and he has to leave her there. And drive home alone. In the dark. In a minivan.”
Pass the tissue! How wonderful is that?!
And second:
Correspondents who tried emailing The Toast editor and Texts From Jane Eyre author [Daniel M. Lavery] in July received an email with the subject line “nope.” “I am currently on vacation and not accepting any emails about anything. I’m not planning on reading any old emails when I get back, either, because that feels antithetical to the vacation experience.”
Wow. Something to think about for this holiday season—or the next time an out-of-office is warranted.
For a few years now, we’ve hosted a few families for a night of S’mores-roasting during the holidays. It has become a tradition! And over those years, the number of children among us has grown from a handful to eighteen. Needless to say, we generally keep things as simple as possible—bags of Jet-Puffed and bars of Hershey in ample supply.
But one year—feeling ambitious—we actually made our own marshmallows—without any corn syrup! We learned that it is surprisingly easy. I had conjured up images of sugary, sticky fingers that leave their mark for days. But the mess was actually minimal. In fact, I’d love to do it again and divvy them up into bags to hand out with some hot cocoa as gifts.
