Most years, our Christmas card — I mean, Holiday card — is a multi-photo, multi-page extravagant affair.

Included, free of charge, is my attempt at giving people an idea in writing of what the year was like and how our mental framework has developed. It also serves as an invitation to our friends to come visit us and share their stories and lives with us.

It’s normally about a paragraph long and it’s a serious invite though few take us up on it.

I work hard on it to make sure it doesn’t come off as a humble-brag. I’m not sure it’s always successful in that way, but I don’t think it comes across like the “Christmas Letter” that gets folded into so many other cards. It’s not a full page list of milestones achieved by the kids. And I know I successfully avoid the cliches and tropes usually found in these things that amounts to a newsletter that comes off as a desperate record of suburban middle-class American life.

It’s also, traditionally, not just a card with some pictures and the pre-written copy from the staff at Minted: “Here’s to Cheer”; “Wishing You A Merry”; “Joy To The World — And You!”.

Except this year.

This year, frankly, has been too complex to find words for. Job loss. A broken sister. Slower walks up the steps for my mother-in-law. Financial fears after the arrival of a tax bill. A realization about our age and our long-term prospects. Social insecurity about the world we moved to. A decision that a career had ended and anger about it spilling into everyday things like loading the dishwasher and folding laundry. An understanding that we never had a real vision for the future and now we don’t have as much future to work it out.

So this year, when I sat down to do the card, I just didn’t have the energy to find optimism.

And I let the pictures do the talking.

Which is to say, our card is just a select set of Instagram posts in cardboard format with pre-written copy from the staff at Minted: Wishing You A Great 2024; Liam, Grady, Heather, Malachy.

That’s it.

I love my kids. I love my wife. We are better off this year than last. We are lucky.

But I really don’t know that I have much more to say about it.

So… no poetry in the card.