Christmess passed!! And one tradition Michael and I have had every year since Eliot was born is to assemble a book of photos to give as an annual gift to a handful of relatives: the VAUNTED GRANDPARENTS. Between death and divorce and remarriage and the way our family structure works, the number of grand- and great-grandparental households nurturing our kids year-round both locally and from across the country stands at five, and adding in a book for ourselves brings the holiday tally to six books — a gift that, six years in, all the grands anxiously look forward to, keep on hand as coffee-table books to share with friends and family, and enjoy all year long.
The books are beautiful: hard-bound, archival-quality, rich photo reproduction on acid-free paper. They’re spendy as hell and worth every last dime; in a season of so many throwaway gifts, they’re one of the things we give into which we truly invest a load of time and effort, knowing they’ll be keepsakes for the recipients — for even our children and their children: a never-aging photo album of each year of Eliot and Nola’s lives.
The process collectively takes us days: me doing a first run culling the thousands of images I’ve taken throughout the year, then Mike editing those into his favorites and doing a first shot at layout, then me coming in and rearranging the layout. Finally, we add titles and any necessary captions and do individual and collective final proofs before preparing them for shipment. It’s a deliberative, painstaking process that we both treat like a job — mine as a former magazine editor and his in design — while also allowing for injections of levity.
Like at the very last moment of this year’s project, when I’d finished the final proof of the final proof while Michael pottered about upstairs, and on a lark I looked at a dust jacket flap photo of the two of us and hastily typed a caption I knew would make him laugh, a caption that he’d obviously then delete and replace with something audience-appropriate.
A little while later, when I was upstairs and he was at his desk, I heard a roar of laughter and Mike shout up, “So you want me to leave this caption on the picture of us, then?” And I groaned back, “Riiiiiiiiight…” All with full knowing he’d do the right thing because IT IS CHRISTMAS AND THESE ARE GOING TO THE GRANDS AND THESE ACID-FREE PAPER KEEPSAKES WILL OUTLIVE THE ZOMBIE UPRISING AND THE MAYAN APOCALYPSE, GODDAMMIT.
So imagine my horror on Christmas morning when I opened my own cherished photo book — which by now had been sent, received, AND opened by every last grandparent — to find this on the dust flap:
Now, when I related the whole horrible mess to my pal Nancy later in the day, she shrugged and said, “Well, you are my favorite Jewish couple.”
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