Dear friends and family, 

I’d like to formally thank you for the picture holiday card, the holiday card containing pictures, or the old-fashioned boxed card you grace my green metal mailbox with each and every December (or January—I’m not a stickler for punctuality myself, and I find it helps to extend the season). 

Please do not stop. Ever. 

I know it can feel like a hassle every year to try to round up your assorted offspring, chosen family, and pets and get everyone gussied up for a festive photo (or 50). That the burden of scheduling this, choosing outfits, selecting photos, and creating the greeting is often borne by one family member alone. I know this holiday tradition can sometimes seem obsolete. I know the amount of address-checking, envelope-licking, stamp-sticking, and hand-cramping that accompanies this mostly thankless task all too well.

So I have decided to thank you. 

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You see, there is this window of sorts in my kitchen. It is directly above the sink and looks into the sunroom. As you might imagine, I spend a lot of time standing in front of my sink and looking through this window. A few years ago, during the dark holiday season of 2020 when the love of most of our kin had to be expressed from afar, I began to hang holiday cards around the frame of this window as I received them. My young children would look at these photos of people they had not seen recently enough to remember, and I would get to tell them about all of these incredible people who love them and miss them and with whom we would reunite on that promised “someday soon” when “we all would be together.” Those cards meant a lot to us that season, and they hung proudly in clear view of anyone who entered my kitchen through the new year and beyond. 

And then, at the beginning of 2021 as we packed away our holiday glitz, I made a decision: I would not take them down. 

Now, I’m an excellent procrastinator and laid back enough to leave up decor items long past their prescribed usefulness even when I have the best of intentions to take them down, but that was not the case here. It would have been easy and quick to pull them all down and put them in the trash during one of my occasional bouts of motivation. The cards had come to feel like part of the decor of my kitchen.  

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And so they remained, to be gazed upon, enjoyed, and explained multiple times to different people throughout the year. To finally be taken down the following season when a new, updated card arrived to take its place. And so on through this holiday season, when nearly each day I have a new card arriving in the mail, usually with photos of people we care for very dearly. I have the opportunity to admire the card with my children as we hang it up, noticing the ways in which our friends, cousins, and pets have grown and changed over the past year. 

This is the season I finally decided to make it official and declare it truly intentional: we will keep your card up in our kitchen for the whole year.

Because we love you, and we love having the chance to remember you at random moments throughout our daily lives. Because we so truly appreciate the effort that you took to create that beautiful greeting and send it our way with such intention. 

Happy holidays! 

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Patricia Bernstein

Patricia Bernstein is a stay-at-home mom and a part-time mental health counselor in private practice. She lives in Connecticut with her husband, two children, and two cats. https://www.instagram.com/betteroffsaidcounseling/

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