The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

My mother has elevated the yearly ritual of Christmas cards to that of an art form. Months of careful planning begin as soon as the current issue gets stamped. Driven by a fierce, self-imposed pressure to do more than just capture a solid family photograph, but to do something creative, something innovative, something even better than last year. Like a mad scientist or a sleepless music composter, she wakes in the night, frantically scribbling down her ideas, lest they slip her memory and be forever lost.

What will we wear? Perhaps the siblings who are married should wear a separate color from the rest of the family. Should I get their names monogrammed on their shirts? Such are the questions my mother must wrestle with in preparation for the next shoot.

My mother’s mailing list is an extensive spreadsheet kept on her computer and backed up by an additional hard drive. It contains not only hundreds of contacts’ names and mailing addresses, but also a record of if they sent our family a card in previous years. Failure to contribute to the Christmas card cycle for three consecutive years usually means deletion from the list. Studying, evaluating, adjusting, editing, my mother pours over the master list like an IRS tax auditor.

The Christmas cards we receive are carefully placed in layers like bricks onto the windows of the breakfast room so that we can critique them while we eat.

“They paid a small fortune in stamps for that one,” someone might comment, nodding towards a larger square in the rows of rectangles.

“That’s exactly what we did for our card three years ago! They’re always copying us,” another member of the gallery laments.

The Frosch’s card one year was the stuff of legend. It featured a beautiful picture of the three siblings and then unfolded to reveal the oldest daughter holding the hand of her new husband. “That is just too good,” my mother said, her voice reflecting the respect of a worthy Christmas card competitor and regret for not having thought of it first.

Our journey as the reluctant subjects of my mother’s creative Christmas carding began when I was about five. Upon the birth of her third child, my mother now had the minimum number of participants required to form a basic nativity scene. She set to work hand-sewing costumes of Joseph and Mary and clearing a portion of our backyard of plastic toys so that the background would not take away from the authenticity of the sacred scene.

After an altogether unholy photo shoot, fraught with the tears of frustration and injustice of being one of my mother’s photo subjects, the final product was surprisingly pleasant. Little Joseph dressed in robes and bearing a staff, standing solemnly over the Holy Babe.  I am kneeling next to the manger, my hands folded together and my golden bowl-cut bowed in reverence. My sister, Jesus, comfortably swaddled in the manger by means of a white sheet and a wicker basket. The only visual evidence of turmoil was the strawberry on my sister’s forehead as our less-than-pious version of Joseph had dumped the manger over during a lull in the action.

My mother was unconventional and fearless, which is exactly not the type of person you want in charge of photographing you. One year, having dressed the lot of us in black tights and matching holiday sweatshirts, she ordered her minions to sit in the middle of the local mall’s holiday display. I tried to explain that the decorations were designed to promote excessive spending and not as a photo backdrop, but she would hear none of it. Caught up in the moment of her creative vision materializing right there, in front of Dillard’s.

“Everybody’s staring at us,” I complained through a forced smile. This, the result of some rather harsh training that my mother had instilled early on; no matter what the circumstances, the show must go on.

“Of course they are,” she beamed. “You look adorable!”

My mother has photographed us in the Floridian surf, our legs freezing in the waves and our faces burning in the sun. A summer vacation to Alaska resulted in a Christmas card being born on an ice glacier, my mother magically producing Santa Clause hats out of her purse and positioning us next to a team of sled dogs. Once, dressed in monogrammed sweatshirts, we were ordered to crowd lovingly around a truly filthy little sheep that smelled awful. “Behold the Lamb of God,” the card read.

Another card in my mother’s portfolio includes a photographic representation of John 1:8. The English translation of the ancient Hebrew reads, “I am the light of the world.” In Christmas card, it translated into five kids crowding uncomfortably close around a candle, our eyes mesmerized by the flame like a swarm of moths.

“That one just didn’t quite turn out,” my mother later admitted.

Occasionally, my mother’s artistic direction would take a more casual approach, such as capturing a family game of Scrabble. All of us smiling brightly in our plaid shirts while the game board just happens to spell out words like “Wonderful,” “Counselor,” and “Prince of Peace.”

These yearly photo experiences were always uncomfortable, but they became increasingly embarrassing as I grew older. My mother chose a particularly vulnerable period in my life at the age of fifteen to ensure that if I wasn’t the laughing stock of my high school, I would at least not have any friends. 

It was nearing the end of September and my mother still did not have an idea for the year’s card. This was highly unusual— like winter catalogue models, we normally conclude our shoot somewhere between the months of May and August to ensure that fall is left clear for the necessary editing, text copying, previewing, distribution, etc. All of us secretly hoped that once, just once, we could catch a break, while my mother grew increasingly frantic with each passing day.

While doing a little shopping at the local Merle Norman, my mother’s prayers for creative inspiration were answered in the form of shirts bearing the face of a sunglass-wearing Santa. I can just imagine her perusing the jewelry, or perhaps fingering a fine leather belt, when her eyes scan the rest of the store’s wares. “Look at those adorable Santa shirts!” She gasps. “And I’ll have all of the kids wear sunglasses, too.” She is already planning out the scene in her head while she simultaneously ponders where she is going to find the suitable eye ware for her three-year-old. 

I had put up with a great deal in my young life, but those Santa shirts were just too much. The entire area code would be getting a copy of this card and my already shaky social life could not possibly withstand the blow. My desperate pleas for mercy fell on the calloused, uncaring ears of a dictator. Before the day was out, Fidel Castro has us all dressed and in position.

I tried to foil her plan by hiding my Oakley’s, but that turned out to be a mistake as she quickly offered up her own dreadful sunglasses. The giant lenses flared out past the width of my face and then wrapped clumsily around each eye socket, shielding my pupils from even the faintest suggestion of sunlight.  Under threat of eternal grounding, she forced the offending accessory over my crying eyes. If you look carefully at the photo, you can still see the tear streaks running down my face.

As if one cross was too little to bear, my paternal grandmother will also occasionally force a family-wide Christmas card. Despite having well over 20 grandchildren, that determined matriarch still manages to find clothing that more or less matches and fits— usually in the form of sweats. Year after year, we gather in front of the fireplace, my grandparents sitting proudly in the middle, the rest of us lined up around them in uniform, like a marching band. This photo process must be repeated for five or more cameras as nobody in the family trusts anyone to give them a copy of the picture.

“I’ll get doubles!” Someone in the mob cries out.

“Oh, we’ll just do one or two more,” my grandmother yells while the wail of crying babies grows louder and whatever holiday dinner the family has gathered for gets a few degrees colder. Growing even more cunning in her old age, my grandmother refuses to feed anybody until her prey has been properly photographed, ensuring that nobody leaves. The crafty old woman takes advantage of the fact that we are a people with an enormous appreciation for food.

The crown jewel of my grandmother’s Christmas card collection is a black-and-white photo taken when I was eleven. Ordered to wear a long dress and forbidden to smile, we were posed around a covered wagon my grandmother just happened to be keeping in her garage. I was accessorized with a large milk bucket and a sunbonnet. My grandfather holds a pitchfork in one hand and a baby in the other. The happiness of my grandmother can still be felt, radiating off the photograph.

Group photo sessions are never easy, but deciding which picture to use can be even more challenging. As my siblings and I have grown older, our opinions have grown louder. We realize that though we have no hope of controlling the costumes or props, we can at least attempt to look normal despite the ridiculousness of our surroundings. All of us crowd around the laptop as my mother scrolls through the results of our latest photo session. We pretend to be looking at the pictures in their entirety, but each of us are focused solely on our stamp-sized statement to the world— our face.

“What about that one?” Claire points to one of the rectangles that has captured her with an especially beautiful smile, her head tilted at just the right angle. Never mind the fact that my father’s eyes are closed, or that Anna’s hair is completely covering her face, or that Tyler is missing from the photo entirely.

My mother has the final say, and to her credit, I think she strives to be fair. She tries to choose a picture that makes most of us look more or less attractive, which is hard to do with ten squirming participants. That is not to suggest that my mother has ever compromised her own personal appearance in the photo. In all my years of Christmas carding, I have yet to see a card go out that didn’t look especially good of her.

Despite my mother’s best efforts, there have been a few cards that have slipped by without being shellacked with props, costumes, or clever tag lines. The 2009 card is considered by my mother to be a complete failure largely due to the fact that we are not wearing identical clothing and the text inside simply reads, “Merry Christmas from the Stallings.”

Of course, whatever relief our dignity enjoyed was brief as my mother renewed her efforts and rededicated herself to her art. The following year brought not one, but two separate photo sessions, each requiring not only different outfits, but were also conducted in completely different states. Both were centered around an outdoor fire pit and marshmallows. For most of October (crunch time in my mother’s Christmas card delivery schedule) my phone was inundated with text messages from my mother pleading for me to come up with a clever way to incorporate the word “s’more” into the text of our card.

“Otherwise, we’ll just have to write ‘Merry Christmas’ again,” she complained, exasperated.