Now that Christmas is past, my family is coming back home. Or rather, my family's photos are coming back to my bulletin board.
A couple of years ago, I made gift tags with each of my family member's photos: tape a photo onto a bookmark-shaped piece of cardboard, punch a hole in the other end, and add a ribbon. At the beginning of the year, I line the tags up along the bottom of my bulletin board, and so I get to see the faces of the people I love.
Over the course of the year, as I buy gifts for people, I take the tags off the bulletin board and tie them onto the gifts. So my family slowly "disappears" during the year, and the faces I can still see are the ones I still want to buy presents for.
My family, who is frugal like I am (well, not quite as frugal as me, but they humor me), cheerfully return the tags to me after they open gifts. As my dad's wife says, "I'm giving this back to you, because I want a present next year!" And then I put the tags back up on the bulletin board.
You know how you put a picture up on the wall or on a shelf or on the fridge, and then after a month you stop seeing it and sort of forget that it's there? Here in chez Miser, we have all sorts of pictures like that around our house -- and in fact, when I painted our bedroom this summer, I took down a bunch of old photos that we don't at all miss now that they're not on the walls.
But because these gift-tag photos come and go, they're somehow different. This time of year, with Christmas just behind us (or rather, still so far away), I've got the faces of people I love in front of me again, filling up space that was blank a week or so ago. Happiness.
A couple of years ago, I made gift tags with each of my family member's photos: tape a photo onto a bookmark-shaped piece of cardboard, punch a hole in the other end, and add a ribbon. At the beginning of the year, I line the tags up along the bottom of my bulletin board, and so I get to see the faces of the people I love.
Over the course of the year, as I buy gifts for people, I take the tags off the bulletin board and tie them onto the gifts. So my family slowly "disappears" during the year, and the faces I can still see are the ones I still want to buy presents for.
My family, who is frugal like I am (well, not quite as frugal as me, but they humor me), cheerfully return the tags to me after they open gifts. As my dad's wife says, "I'm giving this back to you, because I want a present next year!" And then I put the tags back up on the bulletin board.
You know how you put a picture up on the wall or on a shelf or on the fridge, and then after a month you stop seeing it and sort of forget that it's there? Here in chez Miser, we have all sorts of pictures like that around our house -- and in fact, when I painted our bedroom this summer, I took down a bunch of old photos that we don't at all miss now that they're not on the walls.
But because these gift-tag photos come and go, they're somehow different. This time of year, with Christmas just behind us (or rather, still so far away), I've got the faces of people I love in front of me again, filling up space that was blank a week or so ago. Happiness.
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