Each year since 2000 my labour of love has been to create a family calendar that includes everyone’s birthdays…
Easy peasy you may think but given that I’m one of five children, the birthdays on our calendar have now swelled to 79 and growing!
The tricky part is that now my siblings’ kids are having babies, and with it come complexity in that we are spread to every corner of Australia, and if you now include Zach (USA) and Sam (UK) we are truly an international family.
I’ve had to make it a custom calendar that includes holidays from Australia, USA and Canada to ensure all segments of our family have visibility into these.
My calendar making activities has doubled since marrying Judy as her side of the family has 85 birthdays, so we decided to create two calendars as having only one with all of these was too unruly.
Hard to imagine a better labour of love that recognizing everyone in our families!
Each year I gather photos from Zach and Sam for their family calendar, this can be difficult at times as they often don’t take a lot of photos.
Fortunately for me with each having a graduation in the past year I was able to spend time with them and get some great shots to add to this year’s calendar.
From Judy’s side of the family who is spread truly far and wide (USA, Europe, Korea and the Caribbean) it is a little more challenging to get photos especially of high quality that we can use in the calendar.
Often there are way too many photos to include…
Given this scenario we try each year to change it up, so we get a broad spread of photos from everyone in the family.
Creating the calendar is only the first part of our labour of love.
Next comes to validating addresses so we can send the calendars.
Although this year I sent all of the calendars for the Canadian side of the family to Zach who will see everyone in Florida over Christmas. He offered to pass them out and save a little money at the same time.
Judy’s mum has volunteered to hand out to her family in the USA and pass on some of the others.
Even with them passing them out, we still have a bunch in Australia that need to go out individually plus a couple to other countries not covered.
When I arrived at the post office this morning the line grew substantially as I went through the customs forms and postage for all of the calendars.
I guess in the grand scheme of things it was only 15 minutes, but I sensed the restlessness of the line behind me as it grew exponentially.
Patience is a virtue in situations like this.
I find the process of creating our calendars quite relaxing. And a great way to see all of the family events and people that we don’t always get a chance to see or spend time with.
My sister Glenda uses the calendar as her monthly organizer and is well used throughout the year.
Over the years this labour of love has built into quite a collection of photos, and often find myself taking them out to leaf through them just for fun.
Truly one of my favourite things to do as I know that the photos in the calendar showcase some of our most treasured memories, at least from Zach and Sam’s perspective as each month features at least one, is not both of them in the photos.
So many great memories and milestones over the years, all captured within the calendars.
I’ve talked about losing contact with your family in past essays, and this is one way to help keep, well at least to some degree everyone on the same page.
With everyone spread out so much it’s difficult to keep in contact with all members of the family, particularly as they move and change addresses and phone numbers…
In these situations, all we can do is our best.
Next year will mark our 25th anniversary of the family calendar first created back in 2000.
In those days it was far more rudimentary, including a lot less birthdays. It’s great to see the lots of new babies being born over the years.
Not sure if anyone of the extended family will take on this labour of love on in the future, but I have no plan on stopping this annual process at least for the foreseeable future.
Interestingly, as I leaf through this year’s calendar there are a host of dates where we have, between the two calendars up to five people all celebrating the same birthday.
As you can imagine the font has to be quite small to ensure everyone is included.
This is truly a labour of love and not perfect by any means…
Over the years there have been a few missed birthdays as I transposed one set of birthday from one year to the next years calendar.
This is our Christmas present to everyone in our families.
Until next week
Ciao!
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