I know Thanksgiving isn’t here yet but my family never celebrated Thanksgiving growing up so it doesn’t mean much to me. I can’t wait for Thanksgiving to be over because I want to put up the Christmas tree so badly. I love our Christmas tree. It’s one of those pre-lit things from Costco so I suppose purists would say it’s not the “real thing” but it’s the first Christmas tree I’ve ever had and the lights are so pretty.

Seeing the sparkly lights and watching the kids dance around the tree somehow helps me cope with how much I miss my parents and brothers and friends in Tokyo at Christmas-time so I don’t end up a bawling ball on the floor every time I hear a Christmas song or see other families all gathered together. I haven’t spent Christmas with my family since I got married almost 5 years ago.

I didn’t get Christmas cards sent out last year so I’ve started early this year. I finished the fun and easy part yesterday, which was making the card. The tedious part remains: going through pages of addresses making sure they’re all current and getting labels printed. I do not want to write them all by hand.

A couple years ago, I had all our cards professionally printed on high-quality paper. It was pretty … and pretty expensive. This year, I tried designing a card by myself in Fireworks and for a first attempt I think it turned out pretty well.

This is now our computer desktop background image. If you’d like a copy, click here to download.