2000

Big, big disappointment. I had a great idea, but it fell apart in production. Imagine a scene on Christmas morning. Slightly out of focus in the background is a Christmas tree with lights afire. Maybe some early morning light is creeping through the living room blinds. There would also be a few already unwrapped presents lying in front of the tree. And there in the foreground of it all is one of those inflatable punching clowns people my age remember well from our childhood. It was roughly bowling pin shaped with a weighted bottom. You’d hit the clown in the face and it would stand back up. But instead of a clown, it was a perfect caricature of me.

My art director, Mike Lawrence was going to do the artistic honors. But the vinyl that these things are made of wouldn’t accept the paint, so the idea had to be scrapped. And it was the last minute.

I thought about hiring a beautiful, big-haired blond and two adorable kids to pose with me on my fireplace hearth in front of stockings hanging from the mantel. All of us would be wearing saccharinely sweet holiday sweaters. It would be a knock-off of those Christmas cards I was originally mocking in that very first card in 1991. Only in my version, there’d be no explanation of who these people were or why they were with me. I don’t remember why I never pulled the trigger on that one, but I wish I had.

I also thought of another concept in which I was absent. In this one, the camera is looking at the backs of my two labs, Moose and Basco, who are looking up at the mantel where their own stockings hang. Inside each of their stockings would be a tiny kitten. It would be left up to the viewer’s imagination as to what would become of the kittens. But, Wes, my photographer insisted that short of stapling the kitties into the stockings, there would be no way to keep them still long enough to get a shot off.


In the end, I didn’t send anything out at all that year. I got lots of phone calls and emails from people who assumed I took them off the list. They wondered what they did to make me mad that year and what could they do to get back on the Christmas card list.

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