The annual holiday card dilemma

Do I use the picture in which Julia is smiling beautifully but Evan resembles a giraffe? The one in which he looks completely darling but she is making a face which embodies everything I hate about the "nearly 4" stage? The one that's lousy of both of them but is beautifully set with an attractive background? Or the reasonably clear, completely unremarkable photo in which no one is really looking quite at the camera or smiling, but no one is doing anything offensive either?

There's too much empty space on the card if I just put our names, so clearly I need a greeting of some sort. Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah and Happy New Year? That's a mouthful -- and a boring one at that. Season's greetings from our family to yours? A big fat ick all around. Wishing you a happy and healthy 2006? The Grammar Bitch in me cannot help but note that this is not a complete sentence. Maybe I could use a dash instead of an exclamation point?

Before I had children, I bought a couple of packs of holiday cards, wrote them all out in an hour in front of the TV, stuck them in the mail and that was that. And now, suddenly, the holiday card tradition has become the albatross of my holidays season; a month-long obsessive quest for perfection. Every year, as I devote the better part of December to dressing my children up in strange outfits and chasing them around with a camera in search of the perfect holiday card photo, I wonder who the hell I'm doing all of this obsessing for.

No one on my holiday card list is going to look twice at whatever I send. They will say "look how cute" regardless of whether anything about the picture or the card is actually cute, because that's just what you say when holiday cards arrive. They will hang our card up with all of their other holiday greetings (or they will stuff it in a drawer or the trash, I suppose) and they will check their own lists to make sure they've sent us their card, which, truth be told, I won't look at all that closely either. I know all of this. And yet, just as I do every year, I've spent an embarrassing amount of time worrying about my holidays cards over the past few weeks.

Forget the integration of Chanukah and Christmas into one household. Forget long lists and people who are hard to buy for. Forget the crowds and the chaos and the items out of stock. This is what I find myself worrying about three weeks before Chanukah and Christmas. Insanity.