Making of a Christmas Card, 2025

Dec 2025 14 by Ted

Unlike last year, I didn’t have a pre-conceived idea of what this year’s Christmas Card would be. I generally start scanning my photo library around Thanksgiving, but the cupboard was coming up bare. I started to think maybe I’d go into Boston over the weekend after Thanksgiving to see if I could take a picture of lights that spoke to me.

And then I went to Polillio’s in Stoughton to pick up a wreath and kissing ball for the front door and steps. They’re a garden center that I used to use a lot before I moved to the condo, and they always have a lot of Christmas decorations on display around this time of year, so I had my eyes out for something I could photograph.

And then I saw it — a ceramic figurine of a teddy bear in a Santa hat holding a Christmas tree. It was cute, and I figured “A picture of a teddy bear from Ted… why not?” So I picked it up, and set up the table top studio.

The “studio” was a Christmas present from my mother from about a decade ago. It’s a small lightbox about 16 inches cubed, with a pair of lights. It came with white, red, blue and black backgrounds that attach to the back of the lightbox with velcro. I first used it for my 2016 card of the snowglobe. It almost didn’t make the move here, because I’d broken one of the lamps while shooting my 2021 gingerbread house card and hadn’t been able to find an exact replacement bulb. I was originally going to toss it when we cleaned out the old house, but in the end, I brought it over, and I decided to replace the broken halogen bulb and its remaining twin with an LED bulb that turned out to be both brighter and less hot. It was rated as a 5000°K bulb, and the color temperature turned out to be pretty reasonable, and easily adjusted in Photos.

I set the studio up in the dining area, and put the teddy bear in it. I decided to try shots with the white, red, and black backgrounds. For the first set of pictures, I tried all three of my lenses. I knew I wanted to shoot it from the bear’s eye level, and originally envisioned it as a full length picture with open space all around it, and some extra space above for the text. I shot 28 variations, against white, red, then black, and then transferred the results to the computer for a look.

Table top studio with figurine, lights, and camera — Re-creation of studio set-up

I frankly wasn’t thrilled with any of them. The composition was a little too on the nose. I did decide that I liked the red background, and since I knew I’d just picked up ink, I could afford to print a picture with a lot of red. On the other hand, I didn’t care for the composition of any of the red pictures.

Tighter shot of bear against black background

The very last picture I shot, though, had possibilities. I was shooting against the black background, and since I knew I probably wasn’t going to use it, I was a little freer with the composition. I came in tighter, and framed him mid torso up. I didn’t care for the background, but I did like the composition. So I decided to shoot another batch.

Since I had a better idea of how I was going to frame them, I switched to my 105mm macro lens. It’s a fixed focus lens, and is sharpest lens I have. I found for this second session that placement of the lights made a difference — the bear is lightly covered in glitter, and the position of the lights controlled how they would catch the light, as well as the play of the highlights and shadows on the bear itself. I shot 11 variations, and they were better, but still a little flat. Also, in several of the pictures, the glitter next to the bear’s left eye was catching the light strangely. I realized the bear was turned so that the side with the Christmas tree was turned slightly away, and that it should be turned so that the tree side was slightly closer, almost as if he were presenting the tree to the viewer. So I shot one more batch, and this time, I got what I was looking for.

Final picture - medium shot of teddy bear carrying a Christmas tree

I’d done the kind of normal corrections I do for any photo. All my Christmas card photos up to this point had required some sort of Photoshop (or equivalent) work, but when I brought this one into Photoshop, I looked at it and said, “Nope. It’s fine”. This was the first time; all the work was done in-camera, in the framing and lighting.

Next, it was time to manufacture the cards. I duplicated last year’s card files, which had both the inside and outside in them, and replaced the images with the new ones. For the flyleaf, I chose one of the pictures from the balloon flight and another from the train trip in the White Mountains in October. Early versions of the card also had a picture of fall foliage on the Charles River and sunrise at Nantasket, but they made it seem a little crowded, so I dropped them.

View of Crawford Notch from The Mountaineer

I had a shock when it came to print them. Last year I’d been able to successfully print the cards two-sided, which was great since I didn’t need to run the cards through the printer twice, and worry about getting the orientation of the outside and inside correct. This year, for some reason, it kept jamming on me when I tried printing two-sided. Worse, the computer kept forgetting settings between runs. It kept resetting back to two-sided printing, or would revert to normal quality. And since I’d laid it out with a two sided layout, I had to make sure I was correctly selecting the proper pages. The final insult came when I ran a head cleaning cycle on it; cards often print a little bandy, but they were much improved after head cleaning, but unfortunately, but that point, I’d already done most of the cards.

Merry Christmas - Picture of a ceramic teddy bear holding a Christmas Tree — Final card

Merry Christmas, everyone

Making of a Christmas Card, 2024

Dec 2024 21 by Ted

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.

Gazebo with lights on it - wide angle emphasizing framing

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.

Gazebo, from straight on — 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.

Final image - Merry Christmas with picture of gazebo — Cover of the final card.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

LEDs Redux

Dec 2023 31 by Ted

There’s been an noticeable improvement in the quality of LED based Christmas lights this year, They still have the supersaturated blues that the first generation had, but while those had relatively dim yellow and red lights, the newer sets are coming with more and brighter warm colors. With brighter yellows, oranges and reds, I can tolerate the deeply saturated blues.

I went into Boston this evening for the First Night “Pipes and Pops” concert at the Old South Church. I decided to walk through the Common looking for ice sculptures. I found out after the fact that they’d been moved to City Hall Plaza, but I did get to see the city’s official Christmas tree. It was quite nice. It seemed to me that there were a lot more red and warm white lights, and fewer greens and blues. The effect was quite pleasant.

(The concert was really good too, starting with Copeland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and ending with the Radeztky March.)

Making of a Christmas Card, 2023

Dec 2023 23 by Ted

There was a fair amount of uncertainty with this year’s card; when I started thinking about it, in late November, Mum was in hospice, with a fairly large bedsore, and confined to bed. She could still talk somewhat, though she wasn’t saying much. So, since a tradition is a tradition, I started looking through my old photos, and found one I’d taken at First Night 2019 at the Old South Church. The corner of the altar had a big bank of poinsettias. The only trouble was that behind the poinsettias, there was a woman standing, and a stack of books.

So off to Photoshop I went. First, I duplicated the background layer, for safety, Then I used content-aware fill to remove part of the woman. Then used the clone stamp, bit by bit, to extend the wall panels above her lower and lower, until she was gone.

Next, I used a Gaussian blur and a layer mask to throw the area behind the poinsettias out of focus. At this point, I noticed the books behind the flowers, and dealt with them too.

Next was the question of what size card it would this be this year. This also encompassed the question of what I would say this year. At this point, we had been told that Mum was possibly starting to “transition” — the hospice euphemism for beginning the process of dying, but had been told it would possibly take a few weeks. Clearly, it would be an uncertain holiday season.

I did the initial layout the evening of December 10. Nancy had been by in the afternoon, and said Mum looked comfortable and peaceful. I thought I was dealing with half-fold stock, so I laid the card out with the poinsettias on the front and a collage of pictures of Mum on the inside.

Original flyleaf of half-fold version. Pictures are from top, the five of us and Mum on Christmas of 2007, Mum and her sisters-in-law Diane, Anne, and Dot, a Christmas picture from a few years back, Mum and I in the COVID Christmas of 2020, a portrait from 2002, and Diane and Mum on their eightieth birthday.

For the text, I chose “Merry Christmas and Best Wishes for a Happier New Year”, figuring that those who knew would understand.

So I ran off several sheets, and then tried printing the inside on one. It looked gorgeous —except for the perforation running down the middle of it. While I thought I was running half-fold stock, I was actually printing on quarter-fold stock. The card would either have to be re-laid out, or I would have to buy new card stock.

Mum died the next morning. Brian and Nancy came down for mutual support and to go over to the funeral home to make arrangements. I showed the card to Nancy, and she loved it. In the meantime, the funeral home had asked us to provide them with an 8 x 10 of Mum, so we decided to bring two — the portrait above, and another portrait taken Christmas Day of 2007, which is what we used.

I’m not sure why, but it was important to me that this card get out. I wanted to explicitly acknowledge her memory to friends and relatives. I re-laid it out for quarter-fold stock, which meant I could only have three pictures on the flyleaf.

Making of a Christmas Card, 2022

Dec 2022 21 by Ted

I really had no idea what I was going to do about a Christmas card this year, or even if I wanted to do one. I have less free time this year, and I wasn’t really feeling it. There is a big part of me that wanted to do a jump cut to February.

Still, a tradition is a tradition, and so, at the beginning of the month, I was wracking my brain trying to come up with an idea. I didn’t get as frantic as I did in 2013 — I have more confidence in myself now that I’ll figure out something — but I was definitely feeling bereft of ideas.

And then, one day, I was looking at pictures with Mum, and for some reason, I decided to look at my iPhone pictures. And there is was, a picture I’d taken with the iPhone last year:

Ornament on Christmas tree — Ornament on tree, taken with my iPhone 12 Pro

Looking at it, it was nearly perfect. The only thing that bothered me was that you can see my hands holding the phone taking the picture. So I took it into Photoshop, and cut the hands and phone out of the picture, using Content Aware Fill, in several steps. I also bumped up the contrast a bit because printing on card stock tends to flatten the contrast a bit:

Christmas ornament, with the reflection retouched away — After retouching my reflected hands out of the red ball

Content Aware Fill is an amazing thing. It took me maybe two minutes to take care of it; I remember when it would have taken me hours.

Then it was time to lay out the card. Once again, I used two-up card stock, using Apple Pages to lay it out. Vertical cards are actually laid out sideways on the template, so I just grabbed one of my older cards, replaced the images in them, updated the date on the back, and then had to decide on typography.

This year, I decided on white Bodoni 75 with a thin outline and drop shadow for better separation, placed directly on top of the picture. I removed the borders on the text box this year. I’m pleased with the way it came out — the type fits well with the picture, and it looks almost like a book cover.

The hard part this year was what to say inside. This has not been a good year for me or the family, because of Mum’s situation. Do I use the space to send a Mum update? But I send cards to a variety of people, and it wouldn’t be appropriate for everyone I send cards to. And a single message isn’t appropriate for everyone. In the end, for the pre-printed part, I went with the classic “Merry Christmas & Best Wishes for a Happy New Year”.

And here’s the finished card:

Finished 2022 Card Cover - Picture of a Christmas tree ornament with Merry Christmas laid over it. — Finished 2022 cover

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Updates

Dec 2022 20 by Ted

Ten year ago, in “Season of Lights” , I wrote:

Personally, at least for now, I prefer the old-fashioned incandescent types. They seem warmer, with a better distribution of color. The reds and oranges are brighter, the blues less prominent. The newer LED lights seem to be too heavy on the blues. Their blue lamps are quite bright, and their oranges and reds less bright in comparison. I suspect that this is something that will get fixed in time–the manufacturers need to make light strings where the warmer colors are brighter.

I think the manufacturers are finally starting to get it. I have a couple of strings on my tree that seem a little more well-balanced, and I’m noticing as I drive around town that there are more lights that have the characteristic LED deeply saturated blues, but also have decently bright reds and ambers. And for the first time, it feels to me like old fashioned incandescent lights seem reddish.

I’m also noticing that there are warmer “white” LEDs — the trees in front of the police station are covered with them, though they still seem just a touch greenish.

A few months back I took a ride on the new Green Line extension to Union Square. The new branch to Medford/Tufts opened last week, and I took a ride late Sunday afternoon. Like the Union Square branch, it starts off elevated headed out of Lechmere, then runs at ground level. Unlike the Union Square branch, it goes quite a distance. It’s sort of like the Riverside Line in that it’s fully grade separated with decent spacing between stops; unlike the Riverside Line, there are sound barriers along most of it, which kind of feels like you’re riding in a canyon. And boy, have the walls already been heavily tagged. There seemed a fairly decent ridership for late afternoon on a Sunday.

Making of a Christmas Card, 2021

Dec 2021 21 by Ted

It took me a little while to come up with an idea for the card this year. I did take a second look at some of the Christmas light photos I shot in 2016 for the card that year; as it turns out, the same pictures I decided not to work with then, still didn’t speak to me now.

There is also a part of me that is getting tired of creating a new card each year; at some point the card will be a photo of all the prior year’s cards in a basket, and that will probably be the last one. I’m not quite at that point yet, though.

Mum and I got our COVID booster shots at Walgreens a few Saturdays ago; when you get a vaccine dose, you have to stick around for 15 minutes just in case you have an allergic reaction so that they can respond to it. So we fumfed around the seasonal aisle there, and they had a gingerbread house kit. I saw it, and went hmmmm.

Comes a week later, and I still hadn’t gotten any other ideas, so I decided to do it. So I went back to Walgreens and picked up a gingerbread house kit. I realized I needed something to act as a snow surface, so I went over to Michael’s to find some fake snow. I could not find any, and I couldn’t find a single staffer in the store who wasn’t running a register to help me. So I picked up a bag of white cotton, and some deer figurines and miniature trees.

Putting the kit together was pretty simple — the only surprising part was how long it took, because there were several points where you glue a couple of pieces together with icing, and then have to let it sit for 15 minutes while the icing set.

The photography was a problem. What I should have done was pick up a piece of white posterboard to act as a seamless background. What I did do was use the “desktop studio” I got a couple of years ago. It’s basically a 16″ x 16″ x 16″ lightbox, with a small pair of halogen lights to be positioned outside the studio, with red, black, white and blue backgrounds. The sides of the box are intended to diffuse the light to provide a nice soft illumination of the object inside.

Unfortunately, the studio was a little too small for the gingerbread house. It was hard to frame the picture so that the sides of the studio were not too visible. The backgrounds are not really seamless, since they came folded, and have a number of creases. I managed to get a couple of pictures, and then decided to try repositioning the lights outside the studio. While moving the right side light, the cord on the left side light got pulled, it fell off the table, and blew the bulb. So now, I had to live with one of the shots I already had.

None of them were particularly good; this one was the best of a bad lot:

Original picture, taken inside the desktop studio

It’s reasonably evenly lit, but the background is very visible, and the rightmost tree is crooked, and the cotton is pretty sparse in the left front. This turned out to be a fairly major Photoshop job.

First step was to do some basic color correction and lightening of the image.

Second step was to run a Gaussian blur against the background. I selected the area behind the scene, and run a strong blur against it.

Next, I used the stamp tool to even out the cotton “snow”

I’d created two different exposures of the photo when I ran the picture through Camera Raw; now I copied the left side roof from the darker version and combined it with the lighter version, where the roof was burned out.

Then I selected the rightmost tree, and rotated it a few degrees counter clockwise to straighten it out. I ended up using parts of the original layer underneath the working layer, but it ended up OK, even though I probably didn’t do it the right way.

The background was still too dark, so I masked the scene, and started lightening the background, to get it whiter.

Finally, I added some decorations and lights to the trees, then masked out a vignette area around the edges so that the photo would fade to white when printed on the card.

Then I brought it into Pages, using one of my prior year’s templates. When I printed it out, I found the background was still too dark. I ended up just making most of the background part of the scene transparent, so that when laid over a white background, it was white. In hindsight, I should have just extracted the scene from its background, and called it a day. I’m not thrilled with the little vestiges of the blurred background around the scene.

The next problem was what to put inside the card. The only card stock I could find at Staples when I went was half fold card stock, meaning the cards would be full size. I worked off my 2018 card, renamed the file, and changed the images inside. Unfortunately, I just haven’t done much interesting this year, so picking the pictures was hard. I ended up choosing half the pictures from our time on the Cape, and the last couple from a kayaking trip on the Charles.

For the text, I decided to riff on the subject matter and wished people a Merry Christmas and a “Sweet” New Year.

Once again, I decided to include Mum on my cards. People we both knew got a card from both of us, and I basically let her decide what I would would write. She doesn’t have enough dexterity to sign them anymore. For the cards from me alone, I wrote more of a note. I had most of the cards finished and in the mail by the first week of December.

Merry Christmas Everyone.

Making of a Christmas Card, 2020

Dec 2020 24 by Ted

This year’s card ended up being relatively simple, though it didn’t start that way.

Continue reading →

The Christmas That Isn’t

Dec 2020 22 by Ted

It’s Christmastime… but it isn’t. Not with COVID it isn’t.

Normally we would have a big family get-together Christmas Eve. Not this year. Last year, we weren’t able to, with Mum in rehab for her strokes. I was really hoping at the beginning of the year that we could have our get-together again this year. Nope. We’re going to have to content ourselves with video calls this year. Hopefully, we’ll be able to do it in 2021.

We’ve gone up to Rockport most years for the past several years, to shop the stores on Bearskin Neck, and see the decorations. Mum was very fond of the Christmas pageant, because it was a re-enactment of the Nativity. Even if we wanted to take the risk, it’s just not feasible this year.

I’ve gone Christmas shopping every year since I was in college. This year, I ordered a couple of things off Amazon, and that was it. (To be fair, most of this is due to the fact that none of the nephews and nieces are little anymore, and most of my siblings agreed long ago not to do packages.

I wasn’t sure I even wanted to do a tree this year. I’m frankly not feeling it much this year, and I was concerned about laying out the living room — Mum now spends most of the day in her chair in the living room, and whatever I did, I would need to ensure that there was room for the chair and room for her to maneuver with the walker.

Most years, I like to make an occasion of putting up the tree, but not this year. I was also aware that I’d be doing most of the work of putting it up and taking it down. In the end, Mum wanted one, and I realized I did too, so I picked up a relatively narrow tree.

As it happened, there was a gash in the bark about 4 inches from the bottom. We had this a couple of years ago, and ended up with a tree that dried out pretty rapidly, so this year, I made a new cut above the gash, and cut off the lower branches. This had the benefit of making the tree smaller overall — both narrower, and shorter. I was able to use two fewer strings of lights. This meant I was able to skip the older LED lights I’ve been using for the past couple of years. My first set of LED lights were too blue for my taste; eventually, I found a couple of strings of warmer colored LED lights that I like much better. With only the warm LEDs and one string of mini-incandescent lights, this year’s tree is much more pleasing to me. And I was able to fit the angel on the top easily for the first time this year.

Even though it’s smaller, it’s still a pretty nice tree. And there’s still room for Mum next to it.

Making of a Christmas Card, 2019

Dec 2019 22 by Ted

I wasn’t sure I even wanted to do a Christmas card this year, with everything that’s going on. But at one point, Mum indicated she would like to join my card (she later changed her mind), so I started looking though my photo library to see if I had anything suitable. I knew that even more than most years, I did not have the spare time to devote a lot of time to cards. Fortunately, I was able to spend some time on them Thanksgiving weekend.