“Thankfully Daddy didn’t go to heaven;
we wish you a happy 2011”
And thus ended the most inappropriate and raunchy Christmas greeting we’ve ever conceived.
Here’s the background. Imagine two funny teens sitting around in sweats on a Saturday afternoon, a mom who has her first wedding-free weekend in months and a facetious father. The living room was like the mythic backstage writer’s room for any given comedy show and no holds were barred, although they really should’ve been.
Our mission was to complete the Curtis Christmas card and get it off to the printer and no one was allowed to go anywhere till we had it down. The obvious problem was how to publicly share what a rough year we had. In the end we went with accentuating the positive while not ignoring the negative. That was in the end though.
Leading up to it we were laughing our butts off. It seemed that each one of us pushed the other to say something even nastier, as long as it rhymed. Jokes flew back and forth about getting robbed in France, rear-ended in Troy, cancer of the blood and other things you probably don’t even know about.
And it was cathartic as all hell.
My wonderful daughters and amazing wife sitting there shaking with laughter so hard that tears were rolling down their cheeks proved something deeper. Pain and sadness can bring people together, but laughing about it also has an incredible curative power. None of us have had that type of prolonged, insane howling in I don’t know how long.
We actually put all those jokes on a legitimate Christmas card. Nixing the idea of randomly sticking the NC-17 version of our card in with the PG stack we decided instead to send it to just one or two equally disgusting friends.
Don’t get me wrong, the regular card is cute, fun and doesn’t pull punches where punches need to be thrown. Some of you will be receiving it soon enough.
But we printed out a larger copy of the disgusting card so we can always remember the hilarity that helped heal.
