This would've made the perfect photo to accompany their Christmas cards. Jim and Jenny are pictured with Jim's daughter, Jane, and Jenny's son, Evan. Too bad!

The announcement that Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey are splitting up after a five-year relationship made me kind of sad when I heard the news. Although unmarried, from what the tabloid TV shows and other news items reported, it seemed that the couple had a real solid thing going and it looked like they would last for quite a long time. Alas, it appears that there won’t be any McCarthy/Carrey Christmas cards sent out this year.

It’s a shame, too, because Jenny McCarthy had always maintained that her autistic son, Evan, and Jim Carry always had a special relationship. Despite Carrey’s zany behavior during talk show appearances and movie roles that exhibit a somewhat irreverent personality, Carrey’s closeness with the boy shows what the man himself is really about. In fact, it was a couple of years ago at a rally in Washington, D.C. that Carrey admitted that, “Autism made [him] a man.” Although we are not privy to the details of how the actor and McCarthy’s son bonded so well, the fact that the future will be different for them certainly is a disappointment.

McCarthy came into the public eye initially when she posed for Playboy magazine in 1993. Her career branched out as she began to appear on television and as an actress in several movies. To some, McCarthy is most respected for her autism advocacy. She is an author of several books on parenting and autism; her first publication came out in 1997. She is also a spokesperson for the organization Talk About Curing Autism and a board member of Generation Rescue. She believes vaccines have much to do with the spread of autism and that less is more. Through her research and hard work, McCarthy has improved Evans’s condition to the point where he is now classified as “typical”, meaning that although he still has auditory issues, his autism has been cured.

So, while the bad news is that a longtime relationship has apparently ended, the good news is that her son is doing very well and it looks like he has a bright future ahead of him. So this year’s Christmas card – while it may lack the face of Jim Carrey – will be a bright and cheery one nevertheless.