Dec 8, 2017 4 min read

I opened the package, eager to see our 2017 photo Christmas card. Pulling the glossy card from the envelope I slumped back in my chair. How could this happen? They cut off my son’s ear.

Don’t these people know that one of the most important rules of photographing children is that you don’t cut off feet, ears or hands? But there was my son, aged 4, his arms wrapped around his baby sister. He’s missing his right ear and part of that side of his head.

Every year since my son was born, I’ve created a photo Christmas card. People like getting them, but there was another reason I’ve gone to the expense and the trouble. Those cards are a very reliable record of how my children have grown and changed from year to year. Even during those busy grade school years when I slacked off in visually cataloging their development, I always did a Christmas card.

The first ones were labor intensive and unique: For his first Christmas, I put my son in a red onesie and a Santa hat and gave him a piece of chocolate cake. The photo shows him grinning in front of the fireplace, his mouth full of icing and a chunk of cake in his hand. On the inside I wrote “Got Milk?” (Feel free to use that one.)

This was before websites and digital photography made designing a Christmas card fast and easy: no more ordering the prints, waiting for them to arrive, and then gluing them to cards. This year, I logged into the website, found a template that accommodated two photos, and made the card. Around Thanksgiving, I’d snapped a shot of my son and daughter at the kitchen island. He’s standing behind her, his chin on her head and his arms around her. They were actually smiling. It reminded me of a photo taken on the deck of a beach house 17 years earlier, one in which the kids are in the same pose. I dragged and dropped that photo in the left-hand square on the card and slid the new photo into the right square, a clever before-and-after theme.

The old photo must has shifted in that square, because there my son was – on 30 cards – missing part of his right ear. I thought about calling to complain and ask for a new set, but as is usually the case with these websites, there is no human being to take your call. It’s shouting into a dark ravine.

At least their hands are in the pictures. The most skilled photographers will tell you it’s better to back the camera off the subject than to crop out hands and feet. I look at photos from when my kids were little, and I recognize those hands – how my son’s first two fingers on his right hand were a little swollen and sort of grouped together, because as a baby he put those fingers in his mouth to calm himself. That old photo in this year’s card shows my daughter with her hand, fingers splayed, held up to her smile. She has the longest, most graceful fingers you’ve ever seen. Her hands were the first thing I noticed when I held her as a newborn.

When she saw this year’s card, she complained that she didn’t like how she looked in the recent photo. Most people don’t like their photos, but their mothers always do. I’ll add this card to their collections. Someday they’ll be glad to have them, and to see how they changed from year to year – their smiles and their hands and, with a few exceptions, their perfect ears.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.