Christmas Greetings from the Pacific Northwest!

           It started simply enough 24 years ago. Look-wise, John and I are opposites, negatives of each other. He’s blond and blue-eyed. I’m black-haired and brown-eyed. Before we had children, our friends wondered what our kids would look like. We were a real-life genetics “experiment.” Would my dark features be dominant or would a few of my recessive genes line up with John’s?

         When Johnny was born, I thought a photo Christmas card would answer everybody’s question. Three years later, Sarah joined our family and the Christmas picture confirmed the blended genetic traits. Both kids have brown hair and brown eyes. Johnny’s are darker brown than Sarah’s and she is fairer than he is.

That’s how the Christmas picture became our family tradition, and continued annually as a way for distant family and friends to watch the kids grow.

It was the “dark ages” when the tradition began--no digital photos, no email. Somehow the picture would get snapped, and I’d take the roll of 35mm film to the drugstore to be developed. That took a week.

Then I’d pick out the best picture and return to the drugstore with the negative, choose a Christmas card format for it to be printed on, and turn it all in. That would take at least another week.

         One year, when Johnny was three, the film developer used the wrong frame on the negative to create the now family famous poopy face Christmas photo. There wasn’t enough time or money in our budget to get them re-done, so that’s what got mailed out.

Some years I’d remember to take a good family photo when we were on vacation. Then all I had to do was find it in early December. These were the pictures taken by any nameless fellow tourist who was close by. That’s how we got the picture at Stonehenge.

Some were taken by plunking the camera on a nearby steady surface, setting the timer feature, and watching John run back to get in the picture. That’s how we got the picture of us when we sneaked into Tiger Stadium at LSU. Those were the easy years.

The rougher years have been the ones that I tried to plan. I start thinking of locations in November. Sometimes inspiration comes easy. Other times I draw a blank. Then I make suggestions to the family and we go through the “Ewww!!! You’ve got to be kidding. Why would we go there? No way!” process.  Nobody in the history of this family has ever NOT had a strong opinion. (Don’t know whose genes those traits came from. Wink!)

After most of my suggestions have been vetoed, and I’ve said the magic words, “OK, then we’re just not taking a Christmas picture this year. I’ll go to Target and buy some Christmas cards to send out,” people get a little more cooperative.

I started framing the pictures in 1990 and I hang them in the dining room for the holidays.  Looking at the 23-year holiday timeline of our family, I can’t help but remember what went on behind the smiles. We’ve wrangled pets in front of the camera, and gotten the most candid kid smiles over various goofy pet poses. We tried twice to get a picture with Mt. Rainier in the background and failed. It was there when we looked through the camera, but disappeared in the photo.

When the kids left for college, I figured that was it for the Christmas picture, but digital technology and 1-hour Christmas cards saved the tradition. Johnny and Sarah emailed their snowy WSU picture to me. I emailed it to Costco along with a picture of John and me in Beijing, China, and presto, that was the 2009 Christmas picture.

This year, I decided amid the usual moans and groans, that the picture should be taken in Seattle, with the Space Needle in the background. Nothing else says Seattle like the Space Needle! I’d always wanted to “do” this particular picture, I just hadn’t figured out how to make it happen.

The kids are all grown up now, Sarah graduates this spring, and who knows where they’ll end up. This could be our last chance to get the Space Needle shot.

It wouldn’t be easy. If our lives were a Venn diagram, the time that our four lives (five counting our photographer Sarah K.) intersected this past weekend was the tiniest sliver. Work schedules, college break schedules, a mere 8 hours of daylight, holiday traffic, MapQuest and dying I-Phones all conspired against us.

Saturday at 4:00, as the sun disappeared and the rain came down, we were stuck on the Seneca Street off ramp kissing our Christmas picture goodbye. In an act of sheer desperation, I announced, “Well, let’s just get out of the car and take a picture of us with the traffic and big green I-5 signs in the background.”

Luckily, calmer albeit more disgusted, minds prevailed. After a lot of getting lost, turning around, near miss accidents, and strong language, we pulled up at Kerry Park on Queen Anne Hill and exhaled. We all understood immediately why this was touted as the best view of the Seattle skyline and the Space Needle.

It also became clear that if the night vision feature on our camera worked this would be a fantastic picture. The rain and the dark of night worked in our favor. The Space Needle topped with a Christmas tree was all lit up and glowing through the darkness. Nobody, other than a carload of Chinese tourists, was crazy enough to be out in Kerry Park enduring the weather with us.

         We smiled through the cold, wind whipping rain into our faces, trying to look like we weren’t freezing. The city lights, like sprinkles on sugar cookies, sparkled in the rain. And what would a picture of Seattle be without a few raindrops?

Laura Keolanui Stark is calmer now that she can add the 24^th Stark family Christmas picture to the timeline. She can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.

Christmas Countdown

Am I ready for Christmas? Sort of. I always start out early, buying gifts that I think would be great for people throughout the year. Then suddenly, it’s December and I’m shocked.

This year I bought lots of gifts on our trip to China—so many I had to buy another suitcase to get them home. I stacked them up in my dining room. Then Thanksgiving came, and I had to move them so we could actually eat in the dining room. Now they’re buried somewhere deep within our bedroom.

The gifts I ordered online in November are backordered. We didn’t get the Christmas tree last weekend because I was pushing to get a project with an unmovable deadline done, and my husband was leaving on a business trip. The kids were happy because they want to get the tree together, but they won’t be home for a week. Our Christmas cards are up in the air because we usually send a family picture, but with kids away at college it’s been hard to get us all together. We did get our Christmas decorations up in the yard, and I slapped a wreath on the door, but on this side of the door, it is still fall.

Yet, somehow, between now and Christmas, it will all come together. The tree will be decorated. The packages will be wrapped and sent to family and friends. I’ll write our annual Christmas letter, and tuck it in with our cards. I’ll sort through the presents I’ve bought, and then run out without any idea of what to buy for whoever doesn’t have enough gifts in their pile. I’ll play Christmas songs in the car and sing along while searching for a parking space at the mall. We’ll bake cookies and eat way too many. We’ll watch “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and the kids will groan when I insist that we watch the Walton family in “The Homecoming: A Christmas Story.” We’ll rip our closets apart to find something to wear to church on Christmas Eve. The essentials will get done. I used to scold myself about not having everything done perfectly, about only being “sort of” ready, but in the end it always worked out just fine.

Mary and Joseph were “sort of” ready for Jesus’ birth. They knew He was coming, but had to make that trip to Bethlehem to be counted in the census. When they got to Bethlehem, there was no room at the inn. They made the best of it, found a quiet place for Mary to give birth. Then they wrapped Jesus in swaddling clothes, and laid Him to sleep in a manger. They had faith. They knew what was ultimately important. Jesus was born into a world “sort of” ready for Him, and in the end it worked out just fine.

Laura Keolanui Stark is a freelance writer. She can be reached at lkstark@yahoo.com. (Originally published in The Herald, www.puyallupherald.com as “Counting down to Christmas,” on 12/23/09.)