Here's what it takes to get a Christmas card from me to you: First, I go to a few stores and look at cards. I search for a card with a pretty picture or graphic, and a sentiment like Happy Holidays rather than Merry Christmas. I will consider Seasons Greetings, but it's not my first choice. At each store, I'll pick out all the cards I like right away... There might be 20-30 designs in the running. Then I'll get down to 4 or 5 designs/cards that I would actually send. I'm also looking for quality papers like Crane or William Arthur, and this is usually happening in the two weeks before Christmas. The stores may or may not, by this time, even have any good stuff left. Sometimes I go home empty handed. Then cards start pouring into our mailbox. My favorites are the ones that have been lovingly painted or drawn by artists (my godmother, Annette, and our dear friend Helmut). Often Jenny or Dee will send a hand made card.
I'd love to send out hand painted cards, and one year made separate P-E-A-C-E letter stamps which I heat embossed onto each card.
So here we are with a house full of incoming cards and nothing outgoing. I've reduced some of the stress by only sending out cards every other year. Except this year is a year to send them. Here we are on December 22, and I haven't sent one card! I must confess to having a few boxes ready to go, but they are boxes of 10, the designs are all different, and there are about 120 families and people on our list. Do the math. I'm in trouble. The boxes, address book, gold pens purchased especially for the job, Peter's school photos, and photos of the three of us are all on the dining room table, and have been for a week. My husband and son don't have one bit of a care about Christmas cards. They don't even look at the ones that come into the house unless I point them out specifically. It gets worst. So now I have to choose which card to send to which person on the list. I make a list of people who got that card, and I keep it with a sample of that card. (Forever). I also have a Christmas card list in the back of my gift record book, and I mark that too. I have to decide which person gets which photos, if at all. This year the post office has conspired against me with stamps that are less than wonderful. So if these cards get done, I'll use the snowflake stamps saved from the 39 cent stamp days along with the 5 cent teapot stamp. Less than perfect, let me tell you. I'm just thinking now that I could actually make some personalized stamps! That would help. I also decided to send our photo and greeting via email (to be green and to actually get a greeting out to everyone). However, I don't want them to have to click on a link to get the e-greeting. I started to send our Christmas family photo to a few friends, but it looked so plain that I didn't press send. I've got to get that photo over to Photoshop and make it into a card that I can get back to iPhoto so that when I send it, it will be right there in the email. I wonder if I could put music with it too? Probably better not even go there. In other blogs I close by saying "here I go" I'm going to do this project right now, and I'll post the results later. Not today. Today I am going to go out in the messy snowy weather and see Up In The Air with George Clooney. There's a 1:10 show. I need an escape from this Christmas card madness.
It's now almost a week later. And look! On Christmas day I went to my new Adobe Photoshop, somehow got the picture into it, and stumbled on a ready made Christmas theme "border". I added the text in red, and somehow got it back to my desktop file and back into iPhoto from where I sent it to everyone I email. Yea! A green greeting just in time.
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