I wonder how many millions of photo cards the postal service delivers during the holidays. Every year my family gets more in our mailbox and fewer of the old-fashioned Hallmark variety.

As digital cameras improve, I’m also seeing more and more cards with homemade shots, rather than the professionally-posed ones people used to send out (times must be getting tough for portrait photographers). My wife and I love getting photo cards, but we have one pet peeve: Couples who slap on a picture of their kids (or sometimes a beloved pet), but not themselves. We’re usually better friends with the adults than their kids. We’re rarely close with their pets.

Why are so many cards kid-centric? We figure it’s because our friends:

1. Don’t like the way they look.
2. Are incredibly proud of their children
3. Have more cute pictures of their kids than snapshots of themselves with their kids. 
4. Forget to take family portraits when they’re all together.
5. All of the above.

I suspect the first reason is the most common, even though we could care less how good our friends and relatives look. We just want to see their smiling mugs.

Not including a picture of yourself on your card just because you don’t have a good family photo is no longer a viable excuse. That’s because most photo sites now let you create cards with multiple images. Not everyone has to be together in the same photo. You can put a big photo of your kids in the middle, for example, and surround it on either side with a small photo of say, you and your spouse, you and your hamster—or whoever.

If you find normal family pictures too dull, then think creatively. One guy I know shoots a wacky picture to put on his cards each Christmas. One year he dressed like a vagrant, laid down on railroad tracks, and held a bottle in a brown paper bag while his wife and two kids stood nearby looking at him in disgust. The caption read: “Down and out again. Merry Christmas.”

The next year he used a picture—presumably posed—of a cop shoving him against a police car and slapping handcuffs on him while his family looked on in horror.

“Busted again! Merry Christmas,” the card read.

You don’t have to be as creative as my friend to make an impressive card. On photo sites like Shutterfly or Snapfish, you can browse from hundreds of card designs. Some are really slick. All you need to create your own photo cards is a digital camera, some decent snapshots, and an Internet connection so you can pick a card design and upload your photos. Everyone’s doing it. You might as well too.

<John Swenson>