One year, then another

Shutterfly is seductive.

Even if you’ve never ordered from them, your siblings, cousins, in-laws, nieces, nephews and neighbors have. Christmas cards. Wedding announcements. Graduations. Babies. Birthdays. Shutterfly filters and smoothes and documents these events, wrapping lives in a Charmin-soft haze. Their personalized cards, more curated than Instagram, will arrive in your mailbox until the end of time or the demise of the postal service.

Shutterfly’s clickbait shows up in my mail feed during the hours that I should be sleeping, not sleep-shopping. Mugs, blankets, tote bags, T-shirts, trivets. Pick ten, they’re fifty percent off! I feel smug, frugal, for choosing only a pillow and a tree ornament. But then a new offer pops up: unlimited four-by-six prints for free. So why not a dozen? Why not four dozen? I load my virtual cart with abandon. My best photos. Some in triplicate because they’re just that good. Glossy. Matte. I glance at the clock. Five-thirty! Wow, better check out. That’s the total? I gasp. The shipping costs, yikes, well . . . But I’ve already sorted through hundreds of the nine thousand pictures in my iPhone’s library, and chosen, um, fifty, and . . . all that time I spent, can’t let it go to waste . . . All right. They have my credit card on file.

I hit Send. Bad idea.

The company’s algorithms are now able to use the photos I’ve uploaded - voluntarily - during these dangerous bouts of insomnia. They embed them in some pretty weird places. Their idea of a Christmas card? My husband, overexposed, above a red ribbon of white cursive. A Toast to the Holidays! I grope for context. A helpful prompt appears: I’d snapped the photo near the St. Croix, the river that divides Minnesota from Wisconsin. Some alchemy of metadata and artificial intelligence has translated sunlight filtered through a trellis of grapevines? Bingo. A winery.

Minnesota wines are as humble as you might imagine, coming as they do from a region that bills itself as a place “Where the Grapes Can Suffer.” In a recent episode of Succession, Tom struggles to defend the first release from the vineyard that he and his wife, Shiv, own. After unscrewing the bottle and pouring, Tom grimaces. He forges ahead. “There’s a lot to unpack . . . You kind of have to meet it halfway . . . It’s quite agricultural . . .” Finally, he admits the truth. “It’s not very good, is it.”

No, and neither was that Minnesota wine. Or the picture, or Shutterfly’s bizarre suggestion. Or the year, 2020. A terrible year, one I desperately wanted to put behind me. The pandemic. George Floyd. The election and its aftermath. A toast to the holidays? What was there to celebrate?

Shutterfly’s designers call themselves pros. Ha.

I chose a different photo. It’s a cardinal, hunkered on a branch in a snowstorm. I’d taken it with my Nikon, using a lens far better than the one on my phone. A red border, simple message in gold lettering: Peace on Earth. And on the back, To All Creatures Great and Small. More heartfelt than creative, but I wasn’t at my best after four hours of squinting at a tiny screen. Optimistic that my energy level would improve, I ordered twenty-five cards. The premium red envelopes, gold inside, worth the upgrade? Of course. With express postage, Christmas two weeks away, my order came to eighty-seven dollars.

I hit Send.

That was in 2020. Remember? Things had to be better in 2021. The pandemic would end, politics return to normal, kids back go back to school, no more Zoom. Stores and restaurants and theaters re-opened. Best of all, we could finally take off our masks.

My package arrived on December fifteenth. I tore open the box. The cards were gorgeous. I’d done a beautiful job, totally worth the expense. But the events of 2020 had worn on me; I’d never felt so exhausted. I scrounged around for some addresses, found some stamps, and sent out five.

I’d like to say that I mailed the remaining cards last year. 2021, remember? That I wrote a thoughtful letter filled with the year’s good news and placed a copy in each of those envelopes, along with the cardinal and his message of hope. That I trudged a mile to the nearest mailbox, came home, and sipped hot chocolate next to a warm fire. The truth is this: I clung to my branch. I survived. And was too exhausted to deliver the news.

Welcome to 2022.