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.
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.
Original photo
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.
Background cleaned up.
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.
Final flyleaf, with three pictures.Final card front.
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 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:
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”.
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.
Inside of the card
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.
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.
Most years, I tend to get rather frantic trying to figure out what I’m going to put on my card that year. In 2013, I recorded this sequence of steps, and it’s pretty accurate for most years:
I’m not exactly sure where the idea for this year’s Christmas card came from. I started mulling it over in late November. Last year’s Snow Globe was easy and successful, but I wanted something more than just a picture of a Christmas decoration. I wasn’t sure if I wanted a scenic, but I couldn’t think of anything in my library that would suit. Finally, I remembered the tradition of leaving a snack out for Santa, and everything fell into place. Continue reading →
This year was a bit unusual in that I actually had two competing ideas for a card, and I was able to do them with a minimum of stress. The first idea was to get some pictures of Christmas lights at night, and I actually brought the tripod with me into work, and went out shooting afterwards at the Faneuil Hall Marketplace. I did get some good stuff there, but in the end, I decided to go with my second idea. Continue reading →
