The warm wishes will come to you soon...

There are so many things wrong with this, I'm not entirely certain where to start. Last month I went home to Manitoba to visit my parents, and Mom asked me to shimmy down into the crawl space to retrieve some Tupperware bins that she's been meaning to sort through. For years. Fifty three years. For a moment, imagine the grime I ingested. I digress.

From the dusty archives of the Van de Velde home, I bring you the following relic - a hand-made Christmas card. Let it be said that no one wants to take credit for this chestnut. It's that good. There was a date scrawled on the back of it...you could just make out the year 1981. That would have put me at the ripe old age of 7. I told Mom there's no way I was that morbid at age 7. After an admittedly hasty handwriting analysis, she deemed that it had to be me. After all, she said, my handwriting has always been "terribly messy", hence the rather deliberate printing. This comment coming from the woman who agreed with my elementary school teachers that I should skip Grade 4. That's likely the exact year all the other kids my age tackled their grasp of the cursive. Just my luck.

I present you with the most gloomy and morose Christmas card ever created, on two pages of stapled foolscap no less...clearly a piece of fancy red construction paper was deemed inappropriate and over-the-top for such a festive message:

Was I in therapy, you ask? Not that I recall. Let me lie down on the couch right now and we'll dissect the key nuggets together:

1. The obvious. WTF?
2. The recipient was so overcome by this festive greeting, they had to put down their cup of coffee midway through reading in their attempt to absorb the message.
3. At some point, the creator of said card was overcome with Catholic guilt for decorating her festive card with images of presents and flowers; clearly, the message was far too grave and important for such frivolous things. So she did what anyone in possession of an HP pencil with flat top eraser would have done - she set out to painfully erase all evidence of anything that could be misconstrued as happy.
4. "The warm wishes will come to you soon." From whom, pray tell? Sounds ominous and foreboding...apocalyptic even. Jesus. Save. This. Little. Girl.
5. "I HOPE YOU HAVE A GREAT DAY", boomed the all-cap-sentence, shouting at the poor erased image of the wilted flower.
6. "I will tell you what Christmas means to me. Jesus was born on Christmas when nobody was on earth."  Hey, little 7-year-old-Janita, did you miss the part about Caesar issuing a decree that everyone must travel to Bethlehem for the census? No room at the inn ring any bells? Shape up and pay attention, you shifty little shit.
7. "I think about Jesus when he was nailed on the cross but he still was alive." Now that right there is a real pick-me-up line for any festive occasion. Really. It's a strong opener to break the ice at any party. Next time though, save that for your Good Friday material.

Merry Christmas, friends. The warm wishes will come to you soon.
Until then, Merry Christmas and may 2013 bless you big.
Except for your ass. We don't pray for such things. Janita xo

p.s. Reflecting on this some more, this Christmas card was probably my attempt to regain favourite child status after being usurped by my younger sister's  p.s. I Love Jesus routine.

p.p.s. At this time of year, may we reflect on how deeply we love the baby Jesus.