Thursday, November 19
Confessions of a Christmas Card Lunatic
by Karen RobertWhen I was accumulating cards for my book on Christmas cards (Merry Christmas From…150 Christmas cards you wish you’d received) , it became apparent that many of you go to crazy, extreme measures to send out amazing Christmas cards. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not judging, I’m commiserating. I also go to crazy , extreme measures to try get the perfect card. I would like to begin a discussion of those extreme stories with you here in this space over the coming weeks. In order to prod some of you to share your stories, I thought I should confess some of my more extreme, crazed moments of Christmas card obsession.
My husband thinks I’m a bit of a nut about my cards. Admission: he’s right, in fact, at times I have been a real lunatic. It all started when I had my first child and Christmas came around. I spent countless days photographing him in various poses, I put white sheets on the sofa to recreate a white backdrop and coaxed him to coo and smile for the camera. The final photo was of him rolly-polly naked except for a long Christmas hat which discreetly covered his most naked parts. The best part of the photo was that he had a wicked and sly grin. My son would die if I were to show this picture on-line, but it was pretty cute. From then on , I liked my cards to have something a little sly, as if we are all in on some sort of joke. I figured that sending out 200 pictures of my kids was a bit self-indulgent, so the card had to either be artistic or funny. Things slowly got more and more extreme over the years. This is the year things started getting a bit out-of hand:
For this card, I had a perfect family posed picture courtesy of Michael Donnelly. The thing was, we weren’t the sort of family that did perfectly posed pictures. So I grafitied every single card with different colored pens. (I actually took this ideas for our website. We added a feature where you can add things like this onto your photos, it’s much easier than doing it all by hand!)
The the next intensely laborious card was when I put my three youngest kids in t-shirts with the Christmas Greeting. I printed the greeting onto iron-on transfers and pu tthem on the shirts, front and back. I coaxed my asked my great friend Tanya Malott who is a wonderful professional photographer take the picture. Here is the card:
I printed both images on my computer on see-through acetate and put them back to back. I wanted the image to seem as if it had a front and back and was sort of 3-D. But when I stuck them together I could see too much of the other image, so I painted in between them with white paint where the image was. Part of it was transparent, and part of it wasn’t. Then I attached a back to it with my Christmas message and attached all of them together with red string which I threaded through punched out holes. I made 200 of them, staying up all night one night like a creature obsessed. This is the year my husband started to have doubts about my sanity. At 3:00 in the morning, maybe I had doubts as well.
The following year I made a Lift-the-flap card. The older kids were sitting around a present, and if you lifted the flap of the present, inside was a picture of their newborn baby sister. I used an exact-o knife and cut out the flaps and glued the photo under the hole. The funny thing was, I made all of those cards while nursing a newborn! I lost it though that year, I never sent them out, and included them instead with the following year’s cards.
There was also the year where I handmade a pull tab on the cards. When the tab was in, my kids had the bottom of each other’s bodies, you had to pull the tab to get their correct bodies to match up. It was a little messy looking, so I won’t show it here. After cutting and pasting tabs on 250 cards, you can see how it would get messy. After the first 100 my brain became a little addled .
The next year I decided NOT to cut and paste, I discovered my brother’s photoshopping skills instead. This card was much easier to print out, but it was a small movie production to execute:
This card entailed sewing the word “Noel” with green yar and scanning it. Then I got my kids to a photographer (thank you again Michael Donnelly) with a white backdrop. I found a big tool which looked like a needle, attached a rope to it and had them act the part of sewing. The actual card had a front with just the word NOEL, when you opened the card on the inside you saw the back of the sewing as they sewed it. We shot the baby separately since she was being a baby and not cooperating. As you can see, my eldest boy didn’t play the part, he thought it was weird and didn’t want anything to do with it. This was the beginning of the rebellion. My husband had long ago refused to cooperate with the Christmas card production, then one by one the older kids stopped helping or wanting to be part of it.
One year I was left with only one cooperative child, so I ran with it. This is the card that resulted from that. 
I remember sitting in traffic all afternoon stuck in traffic caused by the NY City Marathon, calling the photographer frantically to tell him I would be there shortly. Since it was past dinner time my daughter was tired and cranky, so I ran and got her a snack, dragging my props, the red chair and paint bucket, with me. We got to the photo shoot in the nick of time, I set up the chair, gave her the bucket and the photographer got the shot it in 10 takes ( Michael Donnelly of course) and then my daughter started crying. But I didn’t care, I HAD MY SHOT!!! Then I had my daughter draw a picture of the family and my brother photoshopped it together for me (Thanks again Andy). Voila. The problem now was that my eldest daughter was now furious she wasn’t in the photo, so I put put a family photo on the back of the card to appease her.
Because I thought my oldest daughter cared, I tried to get all of the kids involved in the next year’s photo shoot. Ironically it was the eldest daughter who was the most angry about it . (To see her angry little face on that card, go to my posting of a Jan 7, 2009). My oldest son barely cooperated as well. We obsessive compulsive mothers just can’t win.
Now , what will I do this year….?
Now I’ve outed myself and proved my husband’s suspicions are right; I am a complete nutter. Help me out and back me up. Tell me your stories and prove that I am not alone.
Love the cards. Thanks for all the great ideas.
Comment by Christina Thompson — November 19, 2009 @ 5:27 pm
I can totally relate to your obsession with getting the perfect christmas card picture. I like to have my idea planned out by Halloween and most of the fall is spent finding costumes or props we can use. I try to have a photo shoot before Thanksgiving. With 3 kids under 6 years old, I almost never get exactly what I was hoping for. Sometimes we do a second photoshoot. Usually we have to stop because someone is screaming, crying or being sent to time-out (or all 3). One year I think I will just have to use the out-takes from a photo shoot, they are usually more entertaining than the cards I end up with. I don’t know what I will do once they are old enough to actually refuse to be photographed. I guess the dog will have to step up to the plate then. So, I definitely do go nutty around this time of year. Luckily, my husband is pretty supportive of it all though.
Comment by Amy Ryan — November 21, 2009 @ 8:08 pm