With every Christmas card I write

The question before us is, should we send out Christmas cards this year?

I love to get Christmas cards. December is the only time of year when it's actually fun to get the mail. I mean, I look forward to getting the mail every day of the year (except Sundays, of course). Each day's mail delivery holds such promise, even though it's unwanted items like bills and advertisements every single day. But still the possibility of the mail delivery makes me as excited as a dog about to get a Milk-Bone. When is the mail gonna get here? Ooh the mail is late. Oh look, the mail is HERE! Mail, mail, mail, MAIL!

Inevitably, I am let down by the day's mail offerings.

But in December, there are actually fun, personalized(ish) greetings in the mail! Fun red envelopes containing letters and pictures!

Since I like to receive Christmas cards, I feel like it is my duty to send Christmas cards to other people. And I have carried out this duty every single year since Bill and I got married in 2004.

Our first few years of marriage, we did some kind of a picture/update combination. Mind you, we have never been the type to write the double-sided, single-spaced, 8-point font holiday update letter, the one that recounts every single thing we did in the past year. (I mean, if people want to read several paragraphs about the minutiae of my life, they could just log on to this blog.)

No, our holiday letters included like a two-sentence update on each family member, which in our early years of marriage consisted of Bill, me, and the cat. We always had a lot of news to share, because in those years we got new jobs, moved, had a baby, and changed jobs. The cat's life was more-or-less status quo, but we made up for her lack of news by including a picture of her in her Santa suit. Doesn't she look thrilled?

Anyway, once Nathan was born, we switched over to doing the photo-only cards. I figured a picture of him pretty much conveyed whatever news updates we needed to provide. Some years we were all in the picture, and other years (okay, most years) I felt like I was too fat that year to be in the holiday photo. Some years Leia still made it in, others she did not.

But every year, the Christmas card picture was a big fat pain in the ass. It is so hard to get a cute picture that doesn't have bad lighting or some hideous pile of toys in the background. And sometimes the photo looked okay on my computer, but came out kind of weird-looking when we picked up the photo cards.

And then there was the hassle of making the address labels. First I had to collect everybody's current address. And then one year I tried to make those labels that you buy with the cute little holiday icons on them, and the ink got all smeared. Another year the labels were somehow off in the printer, and half of each person's address was on one label, and half was on the other. And rather than fixing and reprinting the labels, I seriously just cut the labels in half and stuck them together with the label containing the other half.

Sometimes I buy little stickers to seal the envelopes. Sometimes I order holiday-themed pre-printed return address labels. In the end, you're stuffing and sealing 100 envelopes, and then sticking 3-4 stickers (including stamps) on each one. And with each photo card costing a minimum of about 50 cents (and a maximum of way the hell more), plus 44 cents each for stamps, you're looking at about $1.00 per card. And that's before all the cutesy labels and stickers. In all, it ends up costing about $150, plus a huge amount of time and effort.

All this to send updates to people who are updated on our every move on Facebook every single day.

I just counted, and I have 68 photo albums on Facebook. Figuring each album contains an average of about 10 photos (which may be figuring conservatively), that's almost 700 photos of my family.

You know what we look like.

And you know what we're doing, down to the most minute details. Forget the big news like new homes/babies/jobs, you know what we ate for dinner last night. (Let me note that, in addition, we have no new homes/babies/jobs to report this year, so that's another strike against Christmas cards.)

There was a time when I'm sure Christmas cards made sense as a means of keeping in touch with people. You would often hear people describe their relationships with old friends by saying something like, "Well, we're down to just exchanging Christmas cards once a year."

Except, nowadays, you are in touch with everybody in that "Christmas card" category on Facebook. In addition, there are people you're slightly closer to, who you are in touch with via e-mail, text, phone, IM, Skype, or in-person visits. With all these means of communication, there isn't a single person who needs a Christmas card to update them on the goings-on of my life.

So, I might cut out the cards this year, as one way to stop the insanity. I think there will be enough insanity this year with the 40-hour ride Amtrack ride with a 3-year-old.