Birthday Postcard Reset
I last posted in June, right after I had returned from the NJ SCBWI Conference and weeks before our family went on an epic trip to Samoa. We returned days after my mother in law was placed on Hospice and was using morphine for pain management. Memories from my own mother’s last days prompted me to send my husband out to see his mother. Fortunately, she was in better shape than when my own mother started to use morphine. And he returned a week later having had a great time with his family.
What followed was 9 weeks of twists and turns in our lives. Every 10 days or so another emergency or frustration reared its head. My adult college kids’ transportation failed, another college kid now needed a ride to college 3000 miles away, new tenant problems, appendicitis, heart issues, a swarm of possible termites, mother-in-law falls and takes a turn for the worse, husband’s emergency flight home, funeral, car trouble driving back from the funeral, and to top it all off, my HS senior came home from his last XC meet with a stress fracture of his fibula.
An now it is almost November. I’m hoping that life will settle back down to a routine. Part of my routine pre-Samoa was to write Birthday Postcards to family and friends every Sunday. The way I set up my system, has me doing a Birthday Postcard reset every September. That way on Oct 1st, new postcards go out and I’m not stuck doing the reset during the most hectic time of the year: Christmas.
There is a great benefit to sending birthday postcards to all your family for the past 3 years. At the funeral, people you had never met were happy to meet you. Grand nephews were introduced to me as the aunt who sends the postcards. Several people said how much they liked them. And one niece confided that her young family looks more forward to getting my postcards than they do to the money their grandparents send them. All of this gave me an “umph” during a time I felt defeated and tired. So I sat down with all the postcards and printed labels and started picking out cards for each person on my friends and family Birthday list.
It took me all day. (I have about 300 people on my list). I think the most time consuming part is picking out a card for each person. I don’t know everyone on the list really well. Most of them fall into categories, however: Young child, pre-teen, teenager, young adult, young adult with children, middle age parents, older age grandparents and great grandparents. Then there are those who like sports, and those who don’t. And there are males and females and other. I make sure each family doesn’t get a duplicate if possible. I do the best job I can do with the limited knowledge I have.
By the end of one of these sessions, I start to run out of my favorites for a particular category. I also know which cards I love and which cards I hate. I’ve thrown away a whole set of cards because every time I went to send the card to someone I cringed. These images don’t make it onto my website. I don’t spend the extra time making them into notecards or t-shirts or sketch books. They are “dead” to me.
Many family members have commented that they don’t know how I do it. So I thought I’d let you in on how I set it up for success.
First, I gathered everyone’s birthdate and address. I put them into a spread sheet arranged by immediate family. I’ll organize my oldest sibling, spouse and children together before I move onto my second oldest sibling. etc. If I think someone might move that year, or if they are in college, I will often leave the address off the label. This prompts me to ask their parents or send them a Facebook message to get their most current address when it is closer to their birthday. I have one tab for my family, one tab for my husband’s family, one tab for friends, and one tab for fans who have signed up to be on my Birthday Postcard List.
Next: I organize the list so I can import it into a word document that will create labels for me. This year was the first time I did this. In years past I just wrote the addresses on the postcards in long hand. I think I saved a few hand cramps this year.
Third, I go through my list and pick out the card for that person, put the address label on and write their birthday in the upper right corner right where the stamp will go.
After I have them all addressed and birthdates marked, I reorganize them by birthdate and place them in my Birthday Club box. I use old postcards as dividers for each of the months.
Finally, on my calendar, on each Sunday, I write a date that is 2 weeks away. When I go to my calendar, it tells me that I need to be mailing out postcards thru that date. If I miss a week, it gives me a little bit of a buffer so I don’t have to write so many “belated” birthday notes.
My biggest complaint has been: “I want a notecard instead of a postcard.”