Here's how two women keeping Christmas Card tradition alive in different ways

Thirty-four-year-old Ayesha Dominica gets excited about Christmas, perhaps more than elves do – from leaving gifts for loved ones under her Christmas tree to decking up the whole of Bandra’s Chapel road for four consecutive years now. Personalising her Christmas card is another ritual. Last year’s card had a photo of husband Russell and her in tees stitched with stockings holding beer bottles. “We searched quite a bit for the right stocking size, and the right tailor who had a machine to stitch  on the thick stockings because Velcro made the bottles slip.”

This year, they’ve got H&M crop tops shaped as X’masy gifts and Santa-coats, with dangling mismatched earrings. To the photo, Russell will add the words from Giorgio Moroder’s song about people being mirror balls. “It says the shattered glass pieces on a mirror ball are like different people... Once you shine the light on, every piece comes together, like how every person is important.” And the writer and curator doesn’t mind spending – the 2018 costumes cost Rs 3,500 and mirror balls to go with it, Rs 100 each. Once, they gifted four-foot tall lanterns with a card that read ‘Thank you for being the light in our darkest corners of our life.’ The tradition began eight years ago, when the then newly-weds made a card of a photo of them in shorts, ganjis and Santa hats. "Christmas is when I always find people at their lowest. Either they are out of money, missing somebody, hate year endings… Cards like these always brighten their day." A photographer friend shoots their Christmas couple photos every year, and sent to 53 [and counting] close ones. 

Sharon Stoddart, from Sydney, admits she isn’t “a good correspondent” in updating family in India about the lives of her husband and four kids. So she does it once a year, with a Christmas card, rather letter. The family picks chits to decide who writes on whom for the year, and all of it is collated into one write up interspersed with photographs. “It’s not about ‘y’all, see how well my kids are doing’, but, ‘here’s what we’ve been up to this year’. You also get to know the person from their writing… and my kids keep it quite tongue-in-cheek,” says the leisure and healthcare professional.

Like her kid Jennifer writes how Sharon’s “2017 has been about trekking, climbing, exercising and putting her children to shame acing all her university assignments”. While Carmen writes about her brother how “any update on Dan would not be complete without reference to his new, long awaited Toyota 86; a car that I suspect I do not fully understand or appreciate, but he seems pretty happy about it.” With three of her kids having flown out of the nest to different parts of the world, Sharon’s largely written the 2018 letter. Though kids still remained involved by tweaking it on Google docs.