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Why my Thighs won’t be in our Christmas Picture This Year

Why my Thighs won’t be in our Christmas Picture This Year

Last updated on: November 16, 2011 at 9:14 am by Kathy Tuan-MacLean

Why my Thighs won’t be in our Christmas Picture This Year 2011-11-16T09:14:00-05:00 Kathy Tuan-MacLean

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Well frankly, all you ladies know exactly why, and most of you gents as well.

Last night I checked my yahoo account where I do all consumer transactions so I don’t get junk in my work/personal email account. And I saw that Shutterfly’s 40% off sale on Christmas cards ends TODAY. Now that’s extremely annoying because I’d been watching for Shutterfly to announce its sale so I could know when to make our Christmas cards. But either I missed it, or they are marketing so that poor schmoes like me fly into a pre-Christmas frenzy just to get that deal.

We send out almost 500 Christmas cards–I want that 40% discount.

So while watching Glee with the kids I started working on our card.

In some ways it was easy. Last summer, when our family went home to Hawaii, we all took a surfing lesson. I had surfed 4 whole times growing up. Scott had a surfing lesson with a sort of ex-flame of mine that went badly (wonder why?) and the kids had never surfed at all.

It was excellent!

Mama’s photo showing us learning on land first–my
thighs are almost unnoticeable here–they look much
better lying down because the fat can’t sag to the knees

After the lesson, when we got back to the shop, a photographer approached us and told us that he’d been taking pictures the whole time, and for a mere $20/person we could get the photos on a CD. Even though my photo-holic mother was sitting on the beach and had been snapping away at us, she had no tele-photo high-faluting camera like he did.

He scrolled through the pictures and they were so great that my miserly and frugal soul wavered.

Then he said he’d give us all the pictures for $80 and Mama (who’s not frugal) said she’d pay for them, so we have 160 glorious shots of my family surfing.

For 80 bucks, we knew what was going to be on our family Christmas card. Scott wanted shots of all 5 of us.

But last night, scrolling through the pics and uploading them to Shutterfly, I just couldn’t do it.

I can’t display my thighs to 500 of our nearest and dearest friends.

My kids look cute. My girls, thank God, have inherited Scott’s long legs. Scott looks studly. I look like a stumpy-legged-beginning-to-paunch middle-aged woman heading towards the inevitable in my favorite cartoon that I wrote about in “Asian Aging“:

It’s happening. Haven’t hit menopause yet (TMI I know, sorry), but those surfing photos show where I’m headed. After not wearing glasses my whole life, I even now have progressive lenses and I already have frizzy hair. All I’ll need soon is to cut my hair shorter and get that sweatshirt jacket.

Last night I created 9 different Christmas cards using various Hawaii photos and 4 surfing photos of Scott and the kids–but none of me.

When I showed my work to Scott, he called me names and told me I was forsaking our family unity–and then he refused to include his surfing photos if I didn’t include mine.

So neither of us will have surfing photos in our Christmas card. Because I’m just not going to do it.

But if you’re really curious, you can read about our surfing adventure (and even see my thighs) here.

Enjoy.

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November 14, 2011

Ma mere, Kathy

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