Keaghan Turner’s friends and family will receive their Christmas card a little late this year — but it will be absolutely perfect.
Keaghan TurnerChristmas card from the Keaghan Turner family.
The South Carolina university lecturer and mother of two made three attempts — three — at getting the family together for a photo shoot on the sandy coast near their home, about 25 km south of Myrtle Beach. Their first effort was early November, but the weather didn’t co-operate. Their second shot at her husband’s family beach house was also a bust. Finally, in early December, they planted their tinsel tree in sand, donned Santa hats and made Christmas card magic — a greeting that would rival some of the most put-together and personalized Christmas notes they’ll get this year.
“It’s crazy, it’s neurotic that I would drag my kids out there just for this one shot,” she said. “My husband is like ‘Are you kidding me? You have all these other really nice pictures that you already took and they’re getting dressed up again?’”
Ms. Turner, tongue firmly in cheek, calls this ritual the “annual family PR campaign.” She wishes the bar wasn’t so high, but in this day and age, it’s almost the least she can do. Thirty years ago, families sent out Christmas letters, packed with a year’s worth of the family’s joys and successes. Today, they’re making clever YouTube videos that garner thousands, if not millions of views.
This season, the Holderness family in North Carolina is enjoying Internet fame with their video #Xmas Jammies, in which they tout their accomplishments in 2013 (Ironman races! Counting to 100 in Chinese!) and plug their new company.
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It’s the third year in a row that the Slade family in Arizona has filmed creative YouTube Christmas cards, but this year topped them all — a retro rendition of Up on the Housetop that sees the family literally climbing the walls with some homemade equipment and trick photography.
But although these elaborate cards are praised for bringing joy to the season, they’re also mascots for the kind of detail-obsessed, one-upmanship that adds pressure to already harried family lives, observers say. In an age of personal branding, social networks packed with family news and artfully filtered Instagram photos all year long, Christmas greetings have evolved to convey much more than good wishes.
“When it comes to Christmas, we’re expected to up our game, to send something special,” said Aimée Morrison, an English professor at the University of Waterloo who researches the way we document our lives online. “On the one hand, you say ‘I must really care about this, we spent two weekends doing this and had to hire somebody to do the lighting,’ but on the other hand ‘It’s all about me. I’m giving it to you, but this production is all about me and my family.’”
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In the same way our standards of living have risen, so too have expectations around holiday greetings and how we represent ourselves online. Annual family photos that show how much the kids have grown are less meaningful when you’ve watched a child graduate from pablum to solids on Facebook.
Still, the Internet has that pesky distant quality to it, and the fact that it exists in the public domain makes it feel less personal, Prof. Morrison said — a bit like “public performance.”
“But don’t kid yourself that family newsletters [of yore] were substantively different,” she said. “It’s like a kind of humble brag — ‘Oh, gosh, we’re sorry this letter ran to two pages this year, but you would not believe the amazing things that happened!’”
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Of course, the families who put time and energy into creating these videos or pull out all the stops for a photo shoot don’t see their greetings in quite the same way. For them, it’s a living memory of a Christmas project, a way to showcase their talents and spend time together.
Last week, the Bock family in northern Virginia near Washington, D.C., posted a video of the four of them donning chunky sweaters and singing a Christmas-ified cover of Postmodern Jukebox’s doo-wop take on We Can’t Stop, the Miley Cyrus song. It has garnered more than 82,000 views.
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“All in all, it has been a great experience,” said father, Lee Bock, in an email to the Post. “I was afraid that somebody would leave a mean comment on YouTube (because there’s always somebody). But the comments have been overwhelmingly sweet and positive. Some people have even said they weren’t feeling the Christmas spirit until they watched our video!”
The hobby musician and songwriter did the family’s first card in 2011 just for something a little different, and it blossomed into a tradition.
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Same goes for the Slade family, who received media attention all three years they filmed YouTube Christmas cards. The first was a performance of Blue Christmas in a swimming pool underwater. In 2012, they had a food fight to a soundtrack of Andy Williams’ holiday tunes.
“Because of different people saying ‘What are you going to do the next year? I thought ‘Gosh, I don’t know,’” said father, Micah Slade. “But my goal was I wanted people to say ‘How did they do that?’ So I thought ‘It’d be kinda cool to walk on the ceiling.’”
And so on evenings and weekends in November, Mr. Slade, a concrete contractor, built a living room set that balanced on a gimbal, a pivoted support that allows the rotation of an object on a single axis. The video looks professionally shot, though Mr. Slade insists he’s a beginner.
If there’s any one-upmanship going on, it’s a competition with himself — a personal challenge to keep improving, he said.
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“Maybe people perceive it that we’re trying to show everyone up or try to out-do everything, but it’s more of a personal thing, like ‘What would be so fun? What would be so crazy for us to do?” he said. “My wife absolutely hates attention like that. Some people put in a whole dialogue about all of their kids, but that’s just not our thing.”
Kristy Taylor admits her husband would “rather die” than dress up to perform in a souped-up, scripted Christmas card. The Halifax mom of Isabelle, 4, Emmett, 3, and Evie, who will be 2 on Dec. 31, instead opted for a three-minute stream of favourite photos from 2013 set to music and streamed on video sharing site Vimeo. It’s a cheaper option too, especially in a time of high postage prices, and it captures the moments without having to write a narrative that takes time and patience to read.
“I didn’t want to make a production, or a sketch,” she said in an email. “I wanted people to just see a family — my family, and in some ways, their own family — and it’s a keepsake for me too, to look back on when the kids are older and have a visual record of each year.”
The”one-upmanship” these gone-viral cards tend to breed, she said, is “exhausting.”
“You get some parent that does something clever with an elf, and before you know it, your whole [Facebook] newsfeed is covered in photos of all your parent friends doing these amazing clever things with their elves.”
And while the part-time videographer mourns the dying era of sending Christmas cards in the mail (her mother used to send the Christmas letter) this is a new tradition for a new era.
“People have really loved our video,” she said. “It’s not flashy, or high tech. We didn’t write, or sing a song … it was simply us, and our year — just as any traditional Christmas card would have been.”
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National Post
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