By the middle of January, I’ve packed up all the Christmas ornaments, wrestled the fake tree back into its box and tossed the leftover candy canes into the trash. Last to go are the holiday cards. As I archive our family’s card by sliding it into the file folder right in front of last year’s, I can’t help but remember the behind-the-scenes drama which went into the making of the card, a drama which is as much a tradition for our family by now as the card itself.
It starts with me, in early December, unearthing a Santa hat and clearing the memory card on my camera. “C’mon kids, we’re gonna take a picture,” I announce, tossing their holiday apparel at them.
This is, of course, not the whole truth. We’re not just going to take a picture. We are going to take the Christmas Card Picture. That’s a whole different ball of wax.
“What kind of picture?” asks my eight-year-old son, known in these parts as Primo. Then he glances down at the plaid buttondown shirt I’ve handed him and a look of dread comes over his face, “Why are you giving me my party shirt, Mommy? Is it—it’s not—are we taking our Christmas card picture?”
I zip my five-year-old, Seconda, into her red taffeta party dress before replying, “Yes.”
Seconda spins around to face me.
“No!” she gasps.
“Awww mom,” whines Primo, like a rotten kid in a sitcom, “do we have to?”
“Do you have to?” I shoot back and just like that, the fiasco is underway. The mere phrase, “do we have to?” is all it takes to get me started. Hell, I’m still mad from last year’s photo shoot.
“What do I ever ask from you kids?” I lament, like I’m doing an impression of my own mother, except I’m dead serious, “Nothing! Just a few decent pictures of you all together, just twice a year, on Halloween and Christmas—”
“And Easter,” Primo points out.
“OK, and Easter.”
“And my communion,” he continues.
“That was a one-time thing!”
“And the baby’s baptism.”
Already, I’m at a six on the Mad Mommy Scale. Already. And we haven’t even turned the camera on yet.
“Just get outside!” I hiss as I usher them out the door, hoisting the baby, eight-month-old Terza, onto my hip.
We always take the pictures outside because the natural light eliminates the possibility that I’ll go through all the trouble of the Christmas card photo shoot and end up with blurry or shadowy or backlit pictures. I learned that lesson the hard way in years one and two of Primo’s life.
Shooting on the bench in front of our building means we get good light, but it also means we are on public display, which is unfortunate because my parenting during the Christmas card photo shoot is not something I want witnessed by an audience.
“Can I have an M&M?” Seconda asks on the way down the stairs.
“No way,” I reply, “You know the drill. Take a good picture, get an M&M.”
“Uuuuuugh,” she groans.
In theory, taking a decent picture of my children shouldn’t take more than four, maybe five minutes. You sit still, you smile for the camera, you get a heaping handful of M&Ms. Everybody’s happy. We get on with our day. It doesn’t have to be a living nightmare.
This is the same pep talk I give the kids year after year, and every time I believe it can be this simple.
Part of what makes our photo shoot so difficult is that my kids haven’t gotten much practice posing for pictures. For the most part, my husband David and I prefer slice-of-life candid shots, the kind of photographs that capture a real moment in time, that tell a story. I mean, who really wants canned pictures of kids with forced smiles plastered on their faces? Me, that’s who. Two or three times a year, I want those fake smiles and unblinking eyes and arms slung around each other’s shoulders. It’s a lapse in my taste and my sanity, but I can’t help it. I want the perfect Christmas picture. I want pictures that could be mistaken for the stock photographs which are pre-set in frames when you buy them, which Seconda is always confused about (“Why are you buying pictures of these strangers, Mommy??!!”).
Because when I make my Christmas card, what I am really doing is making a little commercial of my family. I want the commercial to be pretty and shiny and happy and touching so that everyone who views it wants to go out and buy a family exactly like mine.
Unfortunately, my kids are not particularly adept at making this kind of commercial. It takes a lot of hard work, a shameful amount of bribing, and the better part of an afternoon to get them picture perfect. Each tiny step takes ten times as long as it should.
The first step—sit on the bench—goes like this: Primo perches on the back of the bench and Seconda sits on the ground. When I correct them, they switch and Primo’s on the ground with Seconda on the back of the bench. Then Primo lays down on the bench and Seconda beats him senseless for stealing her spot. Then Primo kicks her in the guts. Then, mass hysteria.
When they are both sitting next to each other on the bench, I have to insert the baby into the equation. This is, of course, no simple affair. They both want to hold the baby. The baby, on the other hand, wants to be held by no one. She screams on Primo’s lap. She screams on Seconda’s lap. I take a few Baby Screaming shots, thinking we could go for a funny Christmas photo this year. But inevitably, the baby’s hand is blocking one of the kid’s faces, or the kids are hitting each other behind her, and that takes the picture from funny and cute to depressing and troubling.
The baby can’t be bribed with M&Ms. To make the baby happy, I have to do the Mommy-Be-Stupid-and-Crazy Show in which I jump up and down making monkey sounds or stick my tongue out and spit continuously for a full minute, all while trying to hold the camera steady.
This works, and the baby starts smiling. But at that exact moment, Seconda decides she’s had enough and wanders off set. Then Primo figures, “Hell, if she’s leaving, I am too,” and jumps off the bench while he is holding the baby. I have to lunge to catch Terza, dropping the camera in the process and letting forth a pretty ferocious, R-rated string of expletives.
“Lets try not to KILL ANYONE during this photo shoot please!” I shriek.
“Well, it’s your fault for torturing us!” Primo shrieks back.
“Torture?” I bellow, now at least an eight on the Mad Mommy Scale, “You wanna see torture?”
We’ve been outside for ten minutes and do not have one decent photo.
“Kids,” I growl, “I can do this all day. All! Day!”
They know I mean it, too, so they head back to the bench for round two. This time, I let the baby hold a rattle so she’s distracted. Now it’s all about getting the other two not to make totally weird faces. Seconda is eerily photogenic, but she always ends up looking irate. And while it works for Vogue Italia, “furious fiveyear- old” just doesn’t work for our Christmas card.
Primo has a bunch of possible weird faces. There’s the “I’m trying to look really sweet but look like I am doped up on opium with my eyes half-closed” expression. There’s the “I’m trying to look excited but my eyes are popping out of head and my nose is flared like a fire-breathing dragon” expression. And then, of course, there’s the “I’m trying to look pensive but I look like I’m on the toilet” expression, which let’s face it, all of us fall prey to.
So I stand there with my camera, trying to coach him: “Smile! No! Not like that! Less teeth! Ah, no, no, no. that’s the dragon look. More teeth again. No! No, honey, no! That’s the opium look, that’s the worst one! OK, forget smiling. No smiles! STOP SMILING! Good, yes, OK, Oh God, Oh no. That was the toilet look. Ok, let’s take five.”
We huddle up and I give the kids an M&M to keep their heads in the game.
“We can do this,” I tell them,“ We are not inventing the camera. We are not even taking a photograph with a manual camera. We are just taking a picture. Easy peasy.”
Then the kids try, they really do, but the baby’s tired and I’ve confused Primo so much he can’t control his facial muscles anymore, and then the neighbor’s dog wanders into the frame and drools on Seconda’s dress, during which the baby grabs his ear and bedlam breaks out.
I shout, “It’s a wrap!” and toss M&Ms to anyone with a pulse and wonder if there’s a bottle of wine I can uncork post-haste.
“Ok, that was good,” I reassure the kids as we walk up the stairs, “You guys did good.”
Which is stretching it.
Later that night, I check out the fruits of our labor and am royally disappointed. I spend a few hours trying to crop creatively, and eventually decide that rather than a card with one great picture, I’ll make a card with four or six lousy ones, the idea being to inundate my recipients with so many images, they won’t be able to give any of them real scrutiny.
I click and drag and add some punchy copy and then, with a sigh of relief, I hit “Checkout.” And I forget about it.
But when the box of cards arrives in the mail and I take a look at what we’ve created, something miraculous happens. The pictures aren’t awful at all. Sure, Primo’s eyes are kind of droopy in that one, and yes, a large portion of the baby’s forehead is cut off in this one, and Seconda’s smile is pretty goofy here, but when you see it all together, it’s great. Better than great. It’s my family. Definitely not perfect. Not the family everyone, or even anyone else, would buy. But just the way I like them.
To read more of Nicole’s adventures in Mommyland, visit her blog at amomamok.blogspot.com.
