The Christmas Card Tradition

Every year since I was about 7, it has been an annual tradition, usually the day after Thanksgiving, to get together as a family, and go shopping for Christmas trees. Over the years the players have been added and subtracted (my Grandma slipped on some ice and fell, cigarette first, into a tree so she stopped going), but the tradition has withstood the test of time.

A newer tradition that piggybacked off this old tradition, is that now, before we have located our trees, my mother insists that we take a family picture that most likely winds up as the Christmas card picture that she sends out. If anyone balks at this idea my mom sulks, grumbles, and recklessly flings lemons at people until we all relent, smile unconvincingly, and then go back to the business of deciding which tree will constantly poke me and lose all it's needles in the living room in the next month.

The biggest impediment to the whole picture business is that each year we have to find a stranger to take the picture, and each year the stranger is invariably a toothless farmer, hand picked by my mom. I have no idea why she has such an affinity for toothless farmers germing up her camera, but I also have no idea where my dog's tongue goes when he closes his mouth. It's just one of those mysteries.

It's really simple to tell who's going to get picked to take the picture, because generally speaking, there's only about 1 toothless farmer in any given crowd, unless you're at a small town fair, in which case toothless farmers ask you to take their picture. I just run down the line of people.

Me: Hmm, normal, normal, toddler, wheelchair-bound, dog, guy with weird hat, pervert, normal, normal, llama, normal, morbidly obese, Me, Santa Claus, normal, missing arm, normal, missing eyes, normal, normal, ah-hah!!! A toothless farmer!!

Then begins the process of summoning the toothless farmer...

Mom: Saaaayyy???
(Side note: She never says "Hey" or "Excuse Me". It's always "Saaaayyy??". This applies to waiters too.)

Mom: Toothless Farmer? Say, toothless farmer? Will you take our picture you toothless farmer you?

Toothless Farmer: Dadgummit!

So then the toothless farmer, wearing bib overalls, and covered in farmer dirt, shuffles over, and my mom tries to show him which button to push to take the picture, but the toothless farmer shoos her away because he has a media center in his silo, and he knows how to take a dadgum picture, dadgummit!

Then we all squish together and smile, and my mom wants the toothless farmer to take about 8 pictures, just in case one of my kids is picking boogies, or staring at the dirt or something. I think it's rather remarkable, that after all these years, none of the toothless farmers has just shoved the camera down his underpants and walked the other direction. "Zippedy Doo, got me a dadgum camera!" You gonna try to extract a camera from a toothless farmer's underpants? I, for one, am not.

So that's our tradition. I figure, now that it's in the public domain, toothless farmers will flock by the tractor full over to my mom's house. After all, they want their recompense for all the pictures over the years, Dadgummit!!