It shouldn't have been so hard

Note: This post is a little long. If you want the short version, here it is.  Our Christmas letter took longer to produce this year than normal. Read on if you are curious about details of this first world saga.

I have written a Christmas letter every year for the last 20 years and this year was no exception.
However, what should have a been a fairly simple process, did not turn out that way.

Sending out the letter is one of the early things we do for the Christmas season so I start thinking about it in November.  My thoughts are usually something like, "I need to work on the letter," but sometimes I come up with a clever idea for it. This wasn't one of those years, but I got it written all the same. And I got family pictures to include. So far, so good.

Then I checked around and found the best prices for making copies using stationery that I got on clearance last year after Christmas.  I got the letters copied and I was good to go. (BTW, I have found the local UPS store has the best copy prices in my area.)

And then the trouble began. First, I switched to address labels last year and had no problems printing them. But this year, for the first several tries, the addresses were everywhere but on the labels. Very frustrating, but eventually solved, when I found one more drop down menu that had a setting that I needed to change.The money I saved on the paper, I think disappeared with the address label fiasco.

But I powered on. I sat down with the printed letters to write personal notes to each person we were sending them to. About a dozen or two into them, I read the letter one more time to see what I had said and what I might want to say on that friend's note and found out that somewhere along the way a paragraph disappeared from the letter. ##$&*! I was not happy. I had already sealed the envelopes, so I just wrote on the back of them saying, "Alert: Copy error inside. #7 is missing. Oops!" I was tired and that was all I was willing to do.

I showed it to Ward the next day and he gently suggested, that since it was early, maybe we could fix it and recopy them. He was right. A few friends would have enjoyed the mistake, but most people would just be confused. So I started over.

I had various batches of leftover stationery from other years, so I decided I would print some of the letters at home. I fixed the mistake in the letter, adjusted the margins and after tests and samples, I started the printing. But things did not go well. The printer was acting up and so was I because of that. Ward came to help and even with his calm and knowledgeable advice, things were still a mess.  Because of hardware, software, and user errors only 4 out of 16 pages we were working on were good to use. I was ready to give up.

But I didn't. I began again looking for more holiday paper. That was easier said than done. Holiday letters are a dying breed, so many places that used to carry stationery for them don't anymore. However, I eventually found some. We adjusted the letter to the new paper, had it printed, and I began again getting them ready to mail. The notes were not as long as the first time and got smaller and smaller as I went along. But I finished.

In hindsight, perhaps we should not  have been trying to work on them when I was so tired and Ward was barely a day out from a surgery he had had.  He was on good pain meds and was still in the window where they tell you to not make any important decisions or sign any important papers. Who knew that could mean Christmas letters?

Anyway, they're all in the mail now and I've moved onto other things. But, golly. it shouldn't have been so hard.