It's time to start your Christmas Cards.
*Christmas/Holiday/December/End of Year. You know what I mean.
I love sending out our annual Christmas card. I love receiving them and feel that sending them is my part in keeping the tradition alive. For some of my more distant cousins, it is the one time of year I see an updated picture of their kids and get to react in the way we've always cringed at our great aunts doing but now find our elder millennial selves also doing- Wow, Collin is so big now! I can't believe Gwen is in high school; wasn't she born last week? There's something to those Progressive insurance commercials about aging into our parents.
I like to send my Christmas cards on Black Friday. This year (2023), Black Friday falls on November 24.
Before I actually send my Christmas cards, I need to:
take our annual family pictures
get them back from the photographer
select a Christmas card with the 3-4 photos I want to include
write our yearly message, which includes the briefest month-by-month update
order the cards
order (or pickup) stamps, including the correct number of international stamps
build the cards when they arrive (put them in the envelope)
add a return address to the cards
add any handwritten notes to the folks I want to add notes to
add stamps to the envelope
put them in the mailbox or drop them off at the post office
That's not in exact order, but it's roughly correct. In years past, I've gotten bitten by the stamps: not remembering to get them or not remembering to get international stamps had delayed my ideal projected timeline or meant those cards didn't get in the mail until mid-December when the hopes of them making it before the holiday was less-than-zero.
So, despite it being only mid-October, we're taking our Christmas card pictures this weekend. It can take 2-3 weeks for images to be edited by the family photographer we like to use.
Working backward, if I want to send my pictures by November 24
I need a week to prep the envelopes, so I need them in hand by November 17
I need to order the stamps by November 12
I need to order the cards by November 3
I need to have the pictures by the end of October
I need to be taking the pictures this weekend so that I have them back in two weeks
One of the efficiencies I've baked into this process is that we order our Christmas Cards from Minted, where I keep my address book up-to-date year-round. Minted also includes the addresses printed on the envelopes for you!
If you wait until Thanksgiving to start thinking about your Christmas cards, they will not be in the mail by Black Friday, and they'll add stress and problems to what is already a hectic time of year.
Working Backwards
This happens a lot at work too.
We want to have the customer onboarded by November 1...
Great! So, set an internal deadline of October 15 for all the things we have yet to anticipate, and let's get to work identifying all the steps that need to happen between now and then.
Too often, we know what the deadline is without knowing what the timeline between here and there is or should be. Thinking about deadlines as things that can and should be broken apart, broken down, sequenced out, and planned helps avoid the terrible experience of sending Christmas cards on December 26.
Yes, it's time to work on your Christmas Cards if...
If you are okay with sending them after November 24, my deadline might not be yours! Maybe your goal is to send them by December 1, so you have another week. Or, you're doing an iPhone family picture this year, so you don't need to worry about response time from your photographer. You need to adjust the timeline to the constraints you're working with. Similarly, it would be best if you changed the timelines of projects to working limitations like vacation days, travel, and new customers that will pop up.
One of my favorite examples of this comes from an author whose book launch I was following. Her books were printed overseas and coming to the US via freight. The container ship hit rough seas, and the container fell off the boat. All of the printed copies of her books were lost! She needed to push her launch date out because there would not be books to sell!
Not everything can be anticipated. Over 50 Million containers come into the US annually, and the number that fall off is so infinitesimally small that I remember when this made the news. There will be freak accidents that you can't anticipate, but the more your plan does anticipate what's coming, the better you'll be when those things come up.
Something something, failing to plan is planning to fail, something something. Maybe there's a more significant lesson here. Maybe this is just a reminder to get the ball rolling on your Christmas cards.