Our Family Christmas Photo

Every year I get excited about the Christmas photos that are coming in the mail from all of my kids.  There is a tradition in my family that every Christmas, a family picture is taken and mailed out with the annual Christmas family newsletter.  When my kids were young, I decided that I wanted to record each Christmas in a concise way.

The way I came up with to record each Christmas was with a family Christmas photo and a newsletter that summarized each of our family member’s year.  This tradition continued until my oldest son went off to college.  I had known that the day would come that not all of my kids would live with me, but the first one leaving was really hard.

That was the first year that our annual Christmas newsletter had two photos.  The family Christmas photo was me with my husband and only three of our kids.  The other photo that I enclosed was that of our son in front of the sign for his college campus.  I missed him not being in the family Christmas photo, but he had grown up and moved on.

Our annual Christmas photo kept going in the same direction, with one less kid in the picture every couple of years.  My daughter was the first to get married and she sent me a Christmas photo with her and her new husband to send out with our annual Christmas newsletter.  I thought that it was sweet that our tradition had grown to mean so much to her.

This last Christmas, our family Christmas photo just featured me and my husband with our pets.  The newsletter, however, was filled with six photographs.  My granddaughter had her first individual Christmas photo included where she was standing in front of the same college as her dad had attended.

I got out the Christmas photo with my son by himself that first Christmas after he left home and made a copy of it.  I had it framed right next to the photo of my granddaughter in the same location, in the same pose.  I gave these framed pictures to my son and daughter-in-law for Christmas.

I have a file now that is full to brimming with Christmas memories.  I plan to take the entire newsletter collection and bind them into a book which includes each year's Christmas photo for our fiftieth anniversary which is coming up this year.  I will give each of our kids a copy.