I’ve always been ambivalent about the holiday photo card — the snapshots of “here we are casually walking down a country road” or the ones on a beach at sunset where every family member just happens to be wearing white.

They are the Instagram equivalent of the holiday letter — a rosy-cheeked, Photoshopped version of a family’s year. A crying kid on Santa’s lap is an allowable transgression, with tears still in service of maximizing adorableness.

Now that 2020 has left us all depleted, wrung out with grief and disappointment, this season seems like the perfect time to do away with the pretense of it all. In my mailbox this year, I am hoping to see do-it-yourself haircuts, pants without zippers, and yes, the quarantine 15 that all that home baking piled on.

Soon after the baking craze started in May, after the initial wave of lockdown shock started to crest, the “pandemic porch portrait” suddenly was a thing. My social media stream filled with pictures of families gathered outside their homes. When a woman in a local parenting group offered to document our community, I signed up. During our brief session, my husband, our 8-year-old son and I stood looking dolefully at our photographer well over 12 feet away.

After we got the proofs, my husband quipped, “Well, I think we got our holiday card photo for this year!” And, yes, we’re using it. When I looked on photo sites to order up prints, I was glad to see new greetings being offered: “Well, that was crazy!” “We tried.” “Good riddance 2020!” and “It’s a merry, all around crazy sheltered Christmas.”

They are a stride toward honesty. This year, we have seen the fragility and futility of all those hopeful “this year I will” goals set in January.

This year offers a moment to peel back from the code of visual perfection, allowing us to reveal our flaws.

This year, there will be no pictures of children on Santa’s lap. And I hope, for once, my friends will put themselves in the frame and not just let images of their kids stand in for their whole family. Since I can’t see my friends in person, I want to at least see them in the photos. Let this year be the one when we’re all in the picture, as our disheveled, beautiful, surviving selves.

I’m sure there will still be some wind-swept beach scenes, at least in Southern California, where a photographer can shoot this scene from afar. But I’m hoping the 2020 cards show the kind of dour honesty this year has forced on us. We’re using our porch portrait and letting our unsmiling faces be what represents us. I’ll write a hopeful message but acknowledge how bad things have been.

Honesty never was the point of the holiday card, but there is unity in a shared experience of isolation and anxiety. Maybe the pandemic will have lessened our need to pose on all levels. Maybe in this year’s photo greetings, I will see friends and family telling me, “This is where we stood and waited for this to pass.”

Elline Lipkin is a research scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women and teaches creative writing for Los Angeles Writing Classes.