With every Christmas card I write

I can answer that. What’s the greatest challenge in raising a large family in our society?  Some have said that it’s providing physical needs without going into debt:  groceries, school clothing, the house payment, etc.  Others say it is instilling moral values into their developing minds in the midst of a culture increasingly devoid of high moral standards.

While these arguably vie for the top spot, I contend that the greatest challenge is making the annual family Christmas card photo.  It's somehow hard to communicate sentiments which include jolly, merry, happy and general good cheer when four of the six subjects are trying to get in the Guinness Book of World Records for saying "I hate this" the most times in a row without breathing.

I’ve never been one for conforming to time tested traditions.  This is why I raised my hand in the third grade and asked the teacher to please stop making suggestions as to what we could do for our Christmas art because I certainly was not going to be unoriginal enough to do anything that was already suggested.  My request was both unappreciated and denied, so that amidst trees, wreaths and snowflakes on the bulletin board at Holiday Open House, there was my festive monkey drinking a cup of eggnog.  It's belaboring to be this stubborn. The other kids put a little glitter on a green triangle and were already done and throwing erasers.

So needless to say, I'm not much for putting everyone in red velvet dresses, plopping them in front of the Christmas tree, and saying cheese.  No, it has to be original, such as stuffing Santa legs into a chimney on a roof, and anchoring down four terrified kids with bungee cords.  (It's belaboring indeed to be this stubborn.)  I haven't actually ever done that, but I really wanted to.  We have, however, taken a giant mounted deer head, attached a red nose with duct tape, and tried to angle the thing so it merely looked like it was a live deer casually walking through an enormous amount of fabric that you just happened to have hanging in your living room.  Yeah, just an ordinary deer day, walking through this curtain into a room of frilly children.

That wasn't as bad as the time we staged a holiday high tea with an eleven month old and a two-year-old using the good China I inherited from my mother.  That's the first time we found out how much it was to replace a discontinued scalloped saucer on the Replacements Limited website whose slogan happens to be "We Replace The Irreplaceable."  In other words, our normal Christmas was replaced with a small brown package arriving from North Carolina.

Then there was the year we thought it would be cute for the kids to carry huge stacks of presents, their sweet little eyes peeping over the tops of the stacks.  I was thrilled with the idea, but misjudged how much time it was going to take to wrap that many packages.  I wasn't about to waste money by wrapping empty boxes like they do in the stores (Ask me how I found that out.), so I hurriedly wrapped actual gifts for people on our list.  It was so hurriedly, in fact, that I didn't bother with name tags.  I could always get to that later.  Right now I was racing the sun to still take the pictures in some small portion of daylight.  This explains why my brother got a potpourri basket on Christmas morning, and my husband's grandmother opened a Def Leppard cd. 

Even this was not as challenging as the baby in the mailbox (stopped traffic with that one), the cookie decorating one (futility in a snapshot), or the everybody-pile-up-on-one-sled one.  Believe me, that is not as easy to do as it looks like on the Rockwell painting, and there was certainly no peace on earth for the rest of that day.

We try to make the kids laugh by sticking our tongues out and dancing around like Patti LaBelle on catnip.  They look at us with hopelessly sad faces, as if the television has been permanently broken for the rest of their lives, but all the neighbors appear to be having a pretty good time looking out their windows.  We bribe them with ice cream cones and no math for three days.  We threaten them with showing up at their basketball games with huge handpainted signs which say "WE ARE THE SPARKS CHILDREN'S PARENTS."  Finally, we get a smile out of them when, and only when, we say this is the last picture.

I should acknowledge that there is exactly one thing more challenging than getting a good family Christmas card photo without something hanging out of someone's nose, and that is getting a good family Christmas Card photo with the pet in the picture.   If you ever need to fail a test of mental astuteness in a criminal court case, I would suggest you prep with a good round of family photo fun with either the cat or dog.  We've tried both.

When the deed is finally done, and we find ourselves licking 120 envelopes, I've thought about enclosing the annual recap-of-the-year letter like some of our friends do, but it's pretty uneventful for us.  While other families are strutting about six years straight on the honor roll and second seat in the high school band, we're kind of brainstorming to even come up with third place tie in the badminton bracket at the church cookout two summers ago.

So we just stick with the pre-printed message about hoping your home is blessed with the warmth of family this holiday season, but we are tempted to add the post script:  Because it sure got awful hot in ours making this thing for you.

Originally published in Think magazine, 2012