By Tom Kirvan
Legal News
The Easter Bunny recently made his rounds, yet State Bar President Rob Buchanan already is concocting Christmas treats.
Why, you ask?
It’s in the “cards,” a comic Christmas variety the Grand Rapids based Buchanan Firm mails out each December by the thousands to clients, colleagues, friends, and even curmudgeons.
The cards have become collector items for some or a recognition the recipient is a prized member of Buchanan’s “nice” or “naughty” holiday list.
Buchanan, a plaintiff serious injury attorney who heads the State Bar of Michigan this year, was self-deprecatingly cast in one card as “Bad Santa,” poking fun at retail mall versions of St. Nick.
In the 2017 holiday edition, Buchanan offered the following perspective on the man in red: “Christmas is just like a day at the office. You do all the work and the fat guy with the suit gets all the credit.”
The cards are the brainchild of Buchanan, with heavy input from his talented team, including paralegal Leslie Caliguri, intake specialist Caiti Hill, and office manager Janna Vande Griend. The firm’s annual holiday cartoons are laced with the biggest stories of the year, serving colorful barbs to the newsmakers and our cultural landscape. The card’s central theme is always a movie or book parody, Buchanan indicated.
A certain former U.S. President, not surprisingly, was a periodic target of Buchanan’s holiday needle over the past four years. In 2018, the Buchanan Firm card took issue with the Trump administration’s “Zero Tolerance Policy” of forcibly separating immigrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexican border. The card did so under the headline of “Two, Four, Six, Eight, Who Do We Incarcerate?”
That same year, the First Lady visited an internment camp in an Army-green parka emblazoned with “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” and figured in a double play with Justice Anthony Kennedy’s decision to take an early exit from the Supreme Court.
The montage of drawings has an accompanying “Decoder” for the Year-in-Revue Holiday Card for all of the lampoons, though many recipients enjoy the fun challenge of trying to decipher each before checking the answer key, according to Buchanan.
“Initially, we used a QR code linked to a webpage decoder, but that proved difficult for technology challenged folks, so we made the decoder a paper insert instead,” said Buchanan. “It’s proved to be much more popular.”
This year’s card, which takes final shape in October, will be the firm’s 25th edition. Nell Floeter, a Ludington-based illustrator, brings the special cards to life every year.
“She is incredibly gifted and creative, and has become part of our firm’s family,” Buchanan said. “By luck, I found Nell more than 20 years ago after seeing one of her captivating illustrations in the Michigan Bar Journal.”
The Buchanan card has become a labor of love for Floeter, who admires the firm’s lighthearted and creative energy.
“It helps that we share the same satirical humor, which makes the card more fun,” said Floeter. “I like the fact that they are willing to stick their neck out, to poke fun at themselves and where a point needs to be made.”
The 2020 card was a Floeter favorite with a “Ghostbusters” theme, highlighting a “year of supernatural worldwide disruptions,” brought on by virus that cast a nasty spell across the globe. One feature was a royal falling out.
“In January, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle resigned from the British royal family,” Buchanan wrote in the 2020 decoder. “They gave up their paychecks and Brexited to a small surf shack in California, a 14,500-sq. ft. hovel in Santa Barbara. When the Sussex family entered the United States, Border Patrol followed protocol, separating and caging Little Archie.”
Buchanan admitted he enjoys “testing limits and pushing boundaries” with the card each year, and occasionally he gets grief from a thin-skinned recipient.
“On average we probably get one complaint a year, which isn’t bad for how many cards we send out,” Buchanan said, noting they mail upward of 4,000 each December.
“I vow never to send my friends and colleagues a dull, meaningless store-bought holiday card,” Buchanan said. “I want them to laugh, enjoy a few memories, and know that we care about them.”
Two years ago, the card was a whimsical pop-up. The year before that, it was a Mad Magazine type Fold-In cartoon.
“Perhaps next year a ‘scratch-and-sniff,’” Buchanan said with a smile.
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