Old Christmas greetings…part 1

I have…hold your breath now…a character flaw. Shocking, I know. But the truth is, I can be a little bit obsessive. I can fixate on something, to the exclusion of everything else. And three years ago, it came out at Christmas time.

I got this great idea, see, and once the idea was in my head, well, it just could not be let go. I thought, “Why send a Christmas letter when I could send a Christmas video?” Aubrey had been born that year, we had moved from Boise to Newberg, and how cool would it be to send out a video showing Aubrey in the hospital, Aubrey babbling, Talli and Hayley climbing the trees at our old house in Boise, explain our move…oh I’m telling you, the idea just seemed like it was heaven sent.

So I got to work. I transferred video to the computer, I clipped, I edited, I scripted narration, I worked on titles…night after night, hour after hour, Elaine watched me hide behind the computer. Then the creative juices REALLY started flowing. See, the Lord of the Rings movies were in full swing, and I began having these creative ideas for how to weave clips of that into our Christmas letter. So now I’m editing AND scripting AND shooting video for these little skits I was dreaming up…and finally, after being as patient as she could possibly be, Elaine suggested that perhaps Christmas might be a little more enjoyable if I was actually a part of the family instead of having my keyboard grafted to my fingers. Obsessiveness, my friend and enemy.

So all my creative work never was finished, and never saw the light of day. What’s really sad is that I was SO close. All I really had left to do was record narration over the stuff I’d already edited. I kept trying, even envisioning a release soon after New Years…but it was not to be.

I found it the other night, and thought to myself, “Hey! This was pretty good. Too bad I never sent it out.” And then I thought, “HEY! I have a blog! What better thing could my faithful readers enjoy, than to see this wonderfully creative, three year old video!” So, I’ll be posting just the highlights…just the highlights, mind you…over the next few days on my blog.

(You can hardly wait, can you?)

This would have been the introduction to the Christmas video…