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.