As I type I hear a loud hissing noise.

It is the sound of home.

It is the sound our heater makes as it  warms up this little house that stood vacant for the last seven days as we frolicked in that “Green and Pleasant Land” known as England.

I will tell you of this day of travel — because most of it was blog worthy, and not in a pretty and quaint way – I mean blog worthy in a horrible way — when I have the energy and strength to revisit it.

For now, please feel free to enjoy this post I wrote a few weeks ago and never actually posted. I was going to call it,

“The Agony & The Ecstasy”

Without further ado, here it is —

Christmas Cards!

The Agony:

picking the perfect pictures, picking the perfect card, emailing your mom 100 different options to get her opinion, trying to decide which one to go with, the clock ticking, updating your address list then losing the updated list three times, trying to get the card out before Dec. 25th…wondering all the while, “did I pick the right card?” and as you address hundreds of cards you think, “WHY do I do this to myself?!”

The Ecstasy:

Receiving all your family & friends’ Christmas cards in the mail.

Do you too experience the agony and the ecstasy of Christmas cards?

I fret over mine.

And we are talking serious fret-age.

I was talking to my friend on the phone about our Christmas cards and she and I were ready to throw our hands up in the air and just BAG IT this year. But then we realized, “You know how you are going to feel the moment that first Christmas card comes through the letter box….”  JOY! Christmas cheer! Happiness with a capital “H”!

So the cards are in the mail, my friends.

This will reveal the depth of my sentimentality but…

I always mourn the cards that did not make the cut.  I know, it is silly – but I always wish I could send out 10 different cards. I don’t because I would end up driving myself totally bonkers.

Then it hit me, I have a blog!  I don’t have to mourn the cards that never made it to your front doors – I can just show them to you, right here in this very spot!

Without further ado, here are the cards you WONT be getting from the Dawson Fam this year —

These ones I made on Tiny Prints…

We always have a million great pictures of the girls and a handful of good ones of Jan with the girls and me with the girls, but I’ll be darned if we could ever get one with all of us looking smashing together. So this year I toyed with the idea of doing one these collage photo cards, but I don’t know – I just got tired of trying to fill all the boxes in with the right pictures. This only added to the Christmas card agony.

I discovered another cool website, a lot like Tiny Prints, called Minted and these are the ones I put together from that site –

This one with the polka dots was almost this year’s card. Oh, this card is so CUTE! But in the end I went with something that was MUCH cheaper than this option…practicality won the day this year.

And there you have it!

Now that you have seen all these beauties, I hope you wont be too disappointed with the Snapfish card you’ll be receiving shortly.

Dang! I am starting to get an anxiety attack that I picked the wrong card…

too late now!