Every Autumn for the past 4 years, Sarah and I have loaded up Mister B. and Mister C. and made a 45 minute drive to a pumpkin farm.
Our most recent (and most enjoyable) visit was this past weekend.
Perhaps your superb family does something similar around the holidays, be it a trip to the Christmas tree farm, a drive to the local farmers market to choose the most beautiful butternut squash, or a walk down the block to attend a holiday gathering of friends or family.
This was the first year that the boys were possessed of enough autonomy to allow me to actually observe my surroundings with something approaching a presence of mind.
No matter your particular holiday event, I have gathered some observations from my most recent (and most enjoyable) visit to the pumpkin farm that will hopefully save you from one or two highly preventable pangs of regret this holiday season.
These observations are hot off the press of the 2014 holiday season, ripped from bald reality, undiluted and unvarnished.
It is my hope that putting these tips into practice will make your holiday events approximately one jillion times more enjoyable.
1. Pick Your Shots, Annie Leibovitz
How many really good pictures will be enough for you to consider this event “documented appropriately?”
I encourage you to ask yourself this question on your way to the holiday event.
Are ten enough? Are twenty? How about two-hundred?
Your answer to this question will be less important than asking the question itself. Hopefully it will remind you that some limitation on the amount of pictures you take is necessary for you to actually be present and enjoy the event.
Based on my informal observations at the pumpkin farm, no parents took this thought into consideration at all.
Every corner of the farm was a bloodbath of snapping camera phones; shots ringing out ceaselessly from around every hay bale, scarecrow and decorative pumpkin cluster.
Each child’s most disinterested pose was photographed 15 times from multiple angles. Each child was treated with the same level of photographic coverage as Prince George.
I experienced this modern phenomenon of being the subject of paparazzi-level photographic attention in a rare first-hand glimpse as I rode with Mr. B in a hollowed-out barrel attached to a tractor.
Each parent who didn’t ride with their child actually walked along beside this slow-moving train of hollowed out barrels, calling out incessantly to their child to look up for a picture and snapping picture after picture regardless of compliance.
At one point there were 10 people annoyingly brandishing cameras ten feet from my face and calling out loudly to their children.
This, I thought, is the downside of fame with none of the upside.
Though distracting, unnecessary and pointless, perhaps the worst aspect of this unrestrained photography will be the day yet to come.
The day that is coming in a week, or a month, when the memory limit of the device is reached and these poor parents have to face a night of blundering thorough possibly hundreds of badly composed, redundant digital photos in an effort to return some modicum of functionality to their camera.
How many will banish the whole bunch of photos into some folder, never to be seen again? How many will face the prospect of sifting through the trash to find a few golden treasures with a sense of dread and anxiety?
Put your photo habits on a diet now so that when you arrive at your holiday event you will already have some established habits in place to help curb overindulgence.
2. We’re In This Together
On some level, every parent at these holiday events is in a process of just trying to get through the thing all in one piece.
As I mentioned above, this is the first year that I have felt I had even a few extra megabits of bandwidth to offer somebody else.
But in some, ways, I believe that that makes it my duty to offer whatever help I can to those poor first time parents.
The ones who have braved the process of dressing the newborn in a Halloween dress, loading the family in the car, stopping halfway to the event to triage a diaper failure, waiting in the line for tickets upon arrival, waiting in the line for the hay ride, then braving the newborn screaming through the whole hayride.
It’s our duty, for those parents with children of a relatively manageable age, to do whatever we can for those poor parents who brought their baby triplets to the pumpkin farm.
If it’s to say hello and offer to take a picture of their family, we must do that. If it’s to make funny faces at a newborn until it becomes distracted enough to lapse into a temporary silence, then I must remember what it was like for me when Mr. B and Mr. C were that age and deliver a distraction to that newborn as skillfully and enthusiastically as I am able to under the circumstances.
If you are one of these poor parents, have the courage to ask the parent of the teen girl at the Christmas tree lot to hold your baby for a moment so that you can clean the puke off of your blouse.
That parent of the teenager survived the baby toddler and is now neck-deep in a world of hurt she could never have imagined possible when her teenage daughter was small.
Holding your pukey baby for 1o minutes might literally be the best thing that happens to her all day.
In Conclusion
Stop at 10 pictures and lend help to your fellow parent whenever possible.
How much better would everyone’s holiday events be if everyone put these tips into practice this holiday season?
My admittedly unscientific answer is, a jillion times better.
Oh my gosh. This was a WONDERFUL (yes, all caps) article!!!
I find myself wishing more people would try to be ‘present’ to enjoy the moment. Every time I see someone recording an event, I wonder if they’ll experience it in the same way when they view it later. (If they view it later). Seems so much easier to just soak it all in while you’re in it…
I especially like that you mentioned offering to take photos for people. I try to do that as often as I can. Even though they might not be technically good shots, it feels good to know they’ll at least have one pic where everyone’s in it.
My childhood might just have been the opposite – my parents didn’t take many photos at all. And, I think this makes the ones we do have feel more special. I like to think that’s because we’re all about enjoying the moment… But it sure is wonderful to have a photo (even a crummy one!) to bring back the warm fuzzy feelings!
Mary Ann, thank you for this thoughtful comment. I treasure the pics I have of my childhood, and now the pics and videos we have of our boy’s childhood, too! I just took an in-depth look at the Easy Gallery link in your comment above, I love your way of thinking with this photo frame. This is one of those ideas that strikes me as so simple and yet so brilliant at the same time!