{"id":37241,"date":"2022-12-10T00:01:42","date_gmt":"2022-12-10T08:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=37241"},"modified":"2026-06-06T06:53:29","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T06:53:29","slug":"a-widows-christmas-card","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/a-widows-christmas-card\/","title":{"rendered":"A Widow’s Christmas Card — Where’s Jon When I Need Him Most?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"a-widows-christmas-card\"<\/a>
Our 2020 pandemic Christmas card, designed and photoshopped by Jon; it had been ten months since our last haircuts . . . This year it will be a widow’s Christmas card —\u00a0 how am I supposed to pull that off without Jon? Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Where’s Jon when I need him most? It’s time — past time! — to get our annual Christmas card composed and into the mail and I haven’t even started.<\/p>\n

That’s not quite true. I’ve got the family photo part under control. I started that during a trip to the Midwest in September.<\/p>\n

There I am, standing on the deck of an Airbnb<\/a>, testing positive for covid — with Peter, his wife and kids socially distanced on the lawn below me.<\/p>\n

And there I am again at Thanksgiving, posing with Christina and her husband, on the deck where the annual Newhall Christmas photo has taken place since the beginning of time.<\/p>\n

No, It’s not the annual family photo that’s stopping me. It’s those goldarned lines of holiday doggerel that Jon insisted on composing every year, scanned to the tune of “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.”<\/p>\n

It was always Jon who got the project started, right after Thanksgiving, with twenty or so lines of cornball poetry. In the 2020 pandemic year, he wrote this:<\/p>\n

“‘Twas the year before Christmas and all through the house. Not a soul has dropped by. It’s just me and my spouse.” (Doggerel. I warned you.)<\/p>\n

This year, without Jon to do his share — the lion’s share — of the poeticizing, I haven’t had the heart to write that darned poem. My poet’s license has gone missing.<\/p>\n

My first attempt at a widow’s Christmas card, therefore, will be on the slick side — a generic holiday greeting, a generic sprig of holly, and a pair of photos featuring seven shining faces looking into the camera.<\/p>\n

The faces are nice.\u00a0 Holiday appropriate. Cheery. Hopeful.\u00a0Including mine.<\/p>\n

Read about the real Newhall family at, “The Truth Behind That Happy Family Photo We Just Sent You.”<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"a-widows-christmas-card\"<\/a><\/p>\n

My first widow’s Christmas card — my husband isn’t here to compose the poem and photoshop the card. How do I pull it off without him?\u00a0 Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49170,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,14],"tags":[35,2653,34,29,2419],"class_list":["post-37241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-a-case-of-the-human-condition","category-widowed","tag-christmas","tag-christmas-card","tag-dont-miss","tag-jon","tag-widowed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37241"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49171,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37241\/revisions\/49171"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}