The Anatomy of a Holiday Card

Each year for our holiday card, I try to think of something just a little unique.  I want our annual snap shot not only to convey how we looked, but a little bit of what we were like.  Some of my favorite moments of 2014 have been watching the boys read together on the daybed I built in Boden's Nursery, so I decided this year to take that simple nightly ritual and add a Christmas book, Christmas jammies and some holiday decor.  Basically I tempted the holiday card Gods by making the assumption that this would be easy.  But I lived to tell the tale.

I started by adding a string of white lights.  Except I didn't have white wire I had green, which looked terrible.  At least my model looks good.

So I added a piece of garland that I had on hand.  How the heck did the giraffe print get in the photo?

Sheepskin to the rescue.  Now to hide the wire better and get them to read together.  Someone thinks that he's doing a great job.

So I took another dozen photos saying, "Ignore Mommy, just read the book." It was exhausting work.

In the end I think Ryder was getting really concerned with all the red on orange in this room.  Clearly.

So we took a little break and set up a new location.  This is where I screwed up big time and made the ultimate mom mistake- I offered candy for performance.  A little bit of sugar with my kiddos goes a long way.  Things got out of hand.

So I kissed my little sugar fends and called it a night.  No point in taking the merry out of Christmas by forcing an uptight holiday card.  I wanted this to be a snap shot of this moment in our lives after all, and this was certainly us.  Looking through the camera, I had one keeper.

 I created the card with Tiny Prints with a design from their foil stamped collection.

I love how the foil sort of jumps off the page from the soft brushed matte image.  This shot really slows how the light makes these card glitter.

 We have a really big family and I'm grateful that we have a lot of friends we send cards to as well.  But do you know what's not fun about sending 100 holiday cards?  Addressing them.  So once again I borrowed this great idea from Design Finch for these wrap around holiday mailing labels.  I created a new design that matched the back of my cards, imported in all my contacts and printed them onto full sheet sticker.

And used my little paper cutter to cut them all out. The Hubs watched, because he was "helping."

The sticker then wraps around the envelop placing the address on the front, and the return address on the back.  

Which left us with a little family assembly line of stuffing, sealing, address stickering and stamping. Because it's Christmas and we're going to send merry little Christmas card whether you like it or not!

But it was merry actually.  It went really quickly.  Ryder pointed out the names that he recognized, and we told him about the people he didn't know.  I personally made a wish to spend more time with all these great people in 2015.  And the whole thing is another great memory to add to my kid's lists of holiday magic.  We chop down our own tree, we make and send holiday cards to our friends, we make and decorate Christmas cookies and go to Christmas plays.  Hopefully someday they'll look back on all of it as a fun and magical time of year.