It's not Friday.
Now that we've gotten that out of the way, on! To the Friday Find!
Many moons ago, my friend Swistle presented the world with her Christmas/Holiday card scoring system. I review it every year, and every year I nod and chuckle. It's loaded with such gems as "Card is glittery +1. Card sheds that glitter -1." and my personal favorite: "Card includes letter +5...Letter is so very braggy and saccharine-cheery, it crosses over into comical and becomes fun to read aloud in an unkind tone of voice: +2".
Here's the card we sent out this year:
Here's how I think it rates:
+5 for being sent
+3 for being pretty (Obviously, because if it were ugly I wouldn't have chosen it.) (Or WOULD I?) (This card was, uh, not my first choice, but the layout worked best for the pictures we had to use.)
+5 for a photo
+8! for four additional photos
+1 for being either Christmassy or non-Christmassy. I think it's kind of neutral, though it does mention the new year. Still, a point there either way.
Possible loss of 1 point: "Photo was taken on beach this past summer in summer clothing, so family looks chilly against winter pattern of card: -1"
Photos here WERE taken over the summer (and this fall! A couple of weeks ago, even!) in summery settings, and we must subtract one point if it makes you feel shivery. But I'm going to go ahead and say that I don't think this is a very wintery card, nor are we actually on a beach, so we lose no points here.
So we're looking at a final score of 22. Twenty TWO!
From a copywriting standpoint, two things.
1) The lack of comma after "the gift of friends" bothered me, but was not something I could change when personalizing the card. So, I had to adapt the text which I could personalize, and not use an Oxford comma there either. If you can't beat 'em....at least be consistent.
2) I didn't follow my own cardinal rule of writing things that can't be unwritten: Always sleep on it first. The next day I realized how I should've written that lower line, so as to avoid word repetition & make my point more clearly (this was a big year for us): "Here's to fun, good health, and new adventures!".
Ah well. There's always 2015.