I’ve been making my own Christmas cards since 1997, but my 2013 card was the first card I documented here on the blog, and it started an annual tradition I’ve kept up each year since.
There were a couple of reasons I started posting with that card. First, the blog was relatively new at that point. More importantly, that card was a particularly difficult one; I still remember the feeling of being completely stumped for days regarding the subject matter, and the difficulties I had trying to execute the idea once I came up with it, and how ultimately, it came out much better than I hoped for. So I posted about it, patterning the title based on Theodore White’s The Making of the President 19xx series. And I’ve been writing about each card since.
That card had 14 predecessors, though, and I thought it might be fun to look back at them and describe how they came about.
Unlike some years, there was never any doubt as to what this year’s Christmas card would be. I took the basic image last Christmas Eve.
Last Christmas was a pretty dismal one. Mum had died just a couple of weeks before, and to make matters worse, her funeral was a super spreader event. Everyone was sick with either COVID or a bad cold; I was in the latter category. While I tested negative, I felt pretty miserable for the several days before Christmas, and had to cancel the plans I’d made with my sister for Christmas Eve.
By the time Christmas Eve rolled around, I was feeling slightly better, and didn’t feel like just sitting around the house feeling miserable for myself, so I decided to drive down to Nantasket to see the ocean, and hopefully, some pretty Christmas lights. I drove all the way to the end of the spit, took a few pictures of a Christmas tree decorated with lobster buoys, then turned around. By this point it was late dusk. As I approached the beach again, I saw a gazebo decorated with white lights. I pulled over, and took a bunch of pictures from a bunch of angles. I knew almost immediately that would make a good card.
Since I’ve moved, I decided I wanted the card to also serve as a change of address notification. I bought a wreath for the front door, a kissing ball to hang next to the door, and a small pot of evergreens for the front steps (I’m new here, and I didn’t want to poke the homeowner’s association. From some of the other units I’ve seen here, I could have gone a bit bigger). My first thought was to get a shot of me coming out the door with the decorations around me, so I put the camera on the tripod, and took some pictures using the remote control.
Well, they certainly weren’t winners. I hadn’t realized how grumpy my normal expression was. Expression aside, which was fixable, I realized I was blocking the wreath, and the other elements weren’t reading well either. So I shot another set of pictures with the phone one evening without me in the picture, but the doorway lit up.
When it came to make the card, I decided to go with one of the straight on shots of the gazebo. It’s not as wide angle as some of the others, and the tree inside is more prominent.
The chosen image. Straight on, more or less normal perspective.
Because the lights were LEDs, they had a slightly greenish tint which I didn’t care for. So I took it into Photoshop, masked it so that only gazebo itself was selected, and applied a slight color correction to get rid of the green on the gazebo. I wanted the lights to look warm. On the other hand, I wanted the tree green, so I added another color adjustment layer, for just the tree, to make it greener. I wanted the colored lights on the tree to be more colorful, so I added a Vibrance adjustment layer for the lights.
Finally I wanted a little bit of a glow on the lights, so I duplicated the background layer, blurred it, set the duplicate’s opacity to 63%, and applied a layer mask so the blurriness only appeared over the lights.
Final image with color adjustments and a slight glow on the lights.
I then switched to Pages. I started by duplicating last year’s card, and replaced the cover image with the new one. Choosing the right font took a while. I wanted a serif font with a small caps style. Pages doesn’t support small caps natively, so I had to fudge it by using two sizes of text. Choosing the color was a bit of a process too. I like to use “Christmassy” colors of red, gold or green for the card text, but with the deep blue of the background, gold didn’t feel right, and the red was OK… but after a couple of cards I decided I wanted more contrast between the dark red and the dark blue, and added a one pixel orangey-red stroke around the letters to make the letters stand out more. I then moved to the inside of the card.
I decided to make the “change of address” notification on the left leaf, and the main card greeting on the right. I placed the picture of the front door in the middle of the left page, and added a note with my new address. For the right side, I used my traditional Christmas greeting.
There was one year when I was able to get the printer to print both sides of the card in one operation, but for the past few years I haven’t been able to get it to do so cleanly, and have had to feed each sheet twice, which is always error prone. This year, I happened to remember there was a setting for printing on thicker stock, tried it and was gratified to see that I was able to print both sides of the card without problems.
We put up my first Christmas tree in my new home last week. Because we were doing the decorating on a work night, I spread the work over several evenings — it takes a while to get the tree into the stand, get it into the house and get the lights on it. I picked up the tree and got it into the stand after work on Tuesday. It was easier than it used to be in the old place; I used to have to bring it onto the porch, mount it, then carry it through the dining room to the living room. Here, I have a deck right off the living room, so I mounted it outside, then brought it inside and put it in the corner, not far from the sliders.
I think I wound up with a bigger tree than I’m used to. The tree was certainly a lot more expensive. But the ceilings here are taller than the old place. I used to have them make a fresh cut on the tree, then take more off both the top and bottom once I got it onto the porch. This time, they took six inches off the bottom, and I didn’t take anything more off. I did have to trim a little off the top, but I would have wanted to do this anyway, as the top spike extended about ten inches from the bulk of the tree. Tuesday night was damp, so I left it to dry overnight before getting the lights on it.
Wednesday, I added the lights. It took all the lights I had to cover it. I’ve been using LED lights for several years now, but they’re second generation lights that are a little bit less blue than the original LED lights. I also put up the window lights in the dining/living area. These windows look out to the back and aren’t visible from the street, though the side lights might be visible from the neighbor to the back. Really, the lights are more for me, to cast a glow in the room.
Thursday, my sisters and brother came over and we decorated the tree. I brought over most of the decorations from the old place– the tree decorations, the Christmas stable Dad made when I was a toddler, and a lot of the miscellaneous Mum had picked up over the years. We got the tree decorated, and I’ve noticed the girls put up some of the other decorations around the place.
It’s really pleasant to just sit with the room lights out and the tree lights on and listen to Christmas music.
