How We "do" Christmas Cards

One of my favorite things about Christmastime is receiving cards from friends and family.  I just love seeing the photos and reading about everyone's year.  Of course, many (us included) just send a photo, with little or no writing, but it's still fun, nonetheless.  As they arrive, we toss them into a big wooden bowl and frequently look at them throughout the season.

Yes, that's Homer, sharing a table with my Grandparent's vintage Holiday recipe and cocktail books.

Once the season ends, I used to reluctantly toss the cards out, not knowing what else do do with them.  But, over the past few years I found myself saving them and wanting to look back through them.

After all, some families put a lot of effort into the card by staging a special photo, hiring a photographer, or writing a detailed account of their year.  I even have a great aunt who hand paints each card.  At the very least, they bought a pack of cards on sale after the holiday last year, stored them in their attic for a year, hauled them out, signed their name, wrote out our address and stuck a 42cent stamp on one.  So, to honor the effort we all make to send them out, I came up with a way to save them and keep them organized.  I simply punch a hole in the corner of each one, and string them on a ribbon, along with a tag to label the year.  It's a fun little decoration, and we can easily thumb through old cards and reminisce.

This is a great way to wrangle the mass of cards, but "archiving" our own cards is another story.  Frank's Mom has 5 brothers and sisters, and when they were children each year their parents set up a little theme for the family photo.  Most of the time it was only the children pictured.  Cathie recently gathered them all in one large frame.

Some of the themes include a nativity scene, gathered around the fire, dressed as a church choir, on Santa's lap, and my personal favorite, visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads. See them all snuggled up under the covers? 

Her project prompted me to think through how I'd like to preserve our own cards in a special way.  So, I picked up a small scrapbook from Michaels.  Each year I slide our card into a new page.   I envision us 20 years from now looking through that scrapbook.  It will be a mini chronicle of our lives.

Each page is just an open pocket, so we can pull out the cards to look more closely or see the backs.

So, as far as planning and ordering our own cards, here are some things I keep in mind:

• I make sure to include the year on the card so that we (and anyone else who happens to save it) will always have that reference
• As much as I don't want to be in the photo myself, I think it's important for Frank and I to be included.  I enjoy seeing whole families in other's cards, and I doubt I'm the only one who appreciates that.  Plus, if we do it at Christmas,  we're guaranteed to have a picture of our whole family (pets included) at least once each year.
• I try to include a sentence or two about memorable events from the year.  This didn't happen this year, but with a new baby I figure most people know what we've been up to.
• I shop around for deals.  Every printing site offers discounts this time of year.  I get emails and promotional discounts from shutterfly.com, tinyprints.com and minted.com, so I compare to see where I'll get the best deal.  This year it was shutterfly, hands down.  They let me combine several discounts, plus they print the back of the card for free.  I could choose from photo lay-outs, text, or both for no additional charge.  This is a great place to add that sentence about the year, or a top 10 list, or a haiku to sum up the year's events.  

Our good friend Beth came over to be the photographer for our photo shoot.  She was so patient!  She took about 300 photos, and I'm so glad she did.  It takes that many to get a few good ones to choose from.  We posed in a few different places around the house.  This one was our favorite (ie everyone was pretty much smiling):

I played around a bit on the computer to perfect the shot.  I use Aperture to edit photos, so I cropped, then added the Toy Camera action to intensify the colors and add a vignette effect (the darkness around the edges) for the final pic:

I also did a little photo shoot of my own.  I was inspired by this great pic on Pinterest:

source

I set up a little studio on our bed

 and did a few test shots with Bear while the Bean napped.

I know so much less than I would like to know about my new camera.  But, I just played around with the settings until I liked what I saw.  It was a cloudy day, and I had very little natural light.  I was anxious to give this a try, though. 
When she woke, I stripped her down (there was a crib pad under those white sheets, and it came in handy!) and I set her down.

Again, I took tons of shots.  This is what they looked like SOOC (straight out of camera):

But, with a little tweaking and editing on the computer, I ended up with shots like this:

Again I cropped, used Toy Camera, and I also lightened up her face with the Dodge tool.

When the Christmas lights began to warm up, I threw in some plastic ornaments for her to grab.

I'm pretty pleased with the way they came out!  I didn't get any big smiles, but still got some nice shots.  I would love to be able to smooth out the wrinkles in those sheets in the background, but Aperture won't let me do it (as far as I know, anyway). 

Here's the final product this year:

(front)

(back)

So, that's how we "do" Christmas Cards.  Do you guys save old cards?  Do the family photo, or just kids?  Does anyone use the self-timer?  We did that last year, and it took about twice as many photos to get a good one.