Holiday tradition is all in the card for family members

CELINA - The Christmas card from 1992 featuring Garfield the cat was a little tattered, showing its age, as Steve Harris recently presented it to his mother-in-law, Barbara Vorhees.

What started as a friendly gesture 25 years ago has blossomed into a longstanding tradition, creating a strong bond between the two. Harris had been dating Vorhees' daughter, Jill, for a year when Vorhees first chose Garfield to express her Christmas wishes to Harris.

"He was a nice guy in my daughter's life, and I decided to put him on the Christmas card list that year," Vorhees said.

The front of the card shows Garfield saying "Merry Christmas to a good-looking, intelligent, marvelous person." On the inside it reads, "Save this card. You can send it to me next Christmas."

"So, it was just some short humor, and I did. I saved the card, and I sent it to her (the following year)," Harris said, adding she returned it the year after that. "It started to steamroll from there, and it became tradition."

As years passed and Harris became Vorhees' son-in-law, the custom grew to include a letter that highlights the giver's year.

"I try to recap the year," Vorhees said. "I try to go back over things that have happened during the year, hit some highlights."

She said it usually involves milestones and hard times they had surpassed.

"Yeah, I do the same thing," Harris added. "It's become an annual diary, a recap, if you will. We hit some of the big highlights, for instance this year my daughter … graduated from high school."

Vorhees said the letters aren't fancy or particularly well written.

"There's really not a lot of rhyme or reason to it whatsoever," she said. "It doesn't really flow. You really have to look for and find the sequential years."

The tradition, however, has helped document the many changes that have occurred over the past quarter century.

"The card started when my wife and I were just dating for a year, then we were married for a year," Harris said.

Over the years, Harris and his wife moved from Toledo to Celina and started a family. He now is a marketing product manager at Crown Equipment Corp. in New Bremen. He and and his wife have a 19-year-old daughter and a 16-year-old son.

Vorhees had worked as a librarian for Celina City Schools, first at East Elementary and then 18 more years at Celina Intermediate School until she retired in 2014 after 37 years with the district.

Vorhees and Harris said they each have a special place to store the card until it's time to send it back. They both said they are competitive enough to keep going for as long as they can both write and make it to the mailbox.

"Part of the personal part for me is I don't want to be the one to fail," Vorhees admitted. "He's very competitive. I'm a little competitive, and I don't want to be the one to screw this up."

Both agree the most entertaining part of the card is reading through the included notes.

"There's some things that you read and think, 'Oh, yeah, I had forgotten all about that,' " Harris said. "It's a real joy to read it, and you think about some of the challenges that we've faced in our lives. … Those sad moments too are a subtle reminder of how important it is to keep in touch and keep something like this going back and forth and keep that tradition alive."