Christmas Card Party: Thursday, December 6th

We tend to cancel our Letter Writing Club for December because it's so busy in the shop, which is always a little sad because if December isn't a good time to send a few cards in the mail, when is. This year, though, we're keeping our pens inky by running our first Christmas Card Party! It'll take place Thursday, December 6th, from 7-9 pm, at the Main Shop in Little Italy. Mark your calendars! You can come and join us for the whole two hours, or just stop by for a quick coffee and a card or two. We'll have festive music, hopefully the twinkly lights will be up by then (it's a week and a half from now, but there's no telling how things are going to go), possibly some Christmas cookies and apple cider? It'll all be a surprise! Just like Christmas morning. It'll be free to join us, and please bring along any Christmas or holiday cards you'd like to write. It'll be an hour or two to sit and get into the season, get to know someone new, or just enjoy some Christmas treats. If you've got some leftover cards from last year or extra cards from boxed sets, bring them along as well and you might be able to trade your extras with someone else's. We'll also have Christmas cards for sale here, with all cards, including boxed sets 15% off, Christmas cards and otherwise, so if you're stocking up on holiday cards or thank you cards to last you through 2019, you can also pop in for a deal, even if you don't have time to sit and write any cards. We're got a lot of cards coming in for the party, including a few new ones, and I'm excited as we wait for the rest of the packages to start picking out the ones I'm going to use this year. If you need a little inspiration to get you ready for your Christmas cards, check out this blog post from a previous year, or here's another good one. The absolute best trick I've got is that I very, very, very highly recommend you invest the time in making your list, with addresses, before you sit down to being writing. It's a headache to do, although easier after the first year, but it makes the actual writing and addressing and stamping of Christmas cards so much more enjoyable and fun. The sense of satisfaction of sitting down and getting your stack of beautiful cards ready and done is truly excellent. It's the worst when you've written a card and then you're left googling and looking up emails and sending an email to your dad asking if he's got your aunt's address and some of your cards are left on your desk while others are ready to go and then your aunt's card never gets sent and it ends up in the recycling when you clean out your desk in February.  

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This blog post has been in the queue for a while now, and by queue, I mean my imagination. Two or three weeks ago I had mentioned in a blog post that I had been making some small changes to my daily routine, shifting a few things around, and I was feeling optimistic about my increased productivity. The studio shop had started to settle in, Jon paid off all my library fines, I was inspired! Oh, how pride goeth before a fall, chickens counted before the hatching. I'm being dramatic. I had a slightly sick baby (like a runny nose and sort of fussy), and I had to go to the Eaton's Centre twice to be told by a genius that my broken iPhone would cost $419 to fix (she showed me the number on her screen just so there was no confusion), although they got rid of my "start-up disk is almost full notificiation" by deleting four files on my laptop and opening up 30 GB of memory. I had a bizarre number of emails related to things that I had to liaise back and forth with two or three other people about, and I'm possibly the least efficient person to do this because I'm constantly interrupted for possibly hours with picking up kids for lunch and then nap-time and diaper changes and then school's over and I don't check my email again until midnight. This blog post in particular was foiled by delayed shipments, grey afternoons that weren't good for photographs, my own personal disorganization. We also had a couple over for dinner that I barely knew and that's always a bit dicey when you've got a cat who's a bit salty and a dog who's a goofy maniac and two babies who could go either way. In any case, it was a bit of a weird week. I can't say that over the last five years my "routines" have really had time to develop any patina - babies turn into toddlers, cats join the family, you move shops, your team changes, you move shops again, kids start school, retail seasons. I sometimes dream about what it would be like to man the studio shop full-time again, doing a bit of blogging, taking a few photos, making tea in the back, long conversations with regulars. What a dream! I guess I've got that luxury of being torn between enjoying all of the runny noses and pink marker on the two-month-old carpet, and the beauty of routines well-aged.