Design Crafters

Everyone has a favorite; what’s yours?  Oil painting, watercolor painting, pen-and-ink sketches, collages, or even crayons.  No matter what kind of medium is your art of choice, artists all over the world have opportunities to enter their artwork in competitions to be featured on an organization’s Christmas card this coming holiday.  Entries are already arriving at the many different organizations that hold competitions to be the winner, featured on the front of their 2008 Christmas card. 

Once you’ve narrowed down your medium, you might be wondering what kind of art might be more favored by the judges.  Well, considering these are art competitions for Christmas cards, it’s probably safe to say that the subject matter should be some sort of holiday theme.  Snowmen, angels, Christmas trees, carolers, Christmas wreaths on front doors or windows, Christmas tree ornaments, and of course the perennial and timeless favorite:  Santa Claus.   All of these subjects (and more) would make fantastic Christmas cards.  Even those subjects that aren’t as obviously Christmasy would work, as well, including snowy landscapes, starry skys, peaceful still lifes, and simple, unadorned Christmas trees growing in the forest.  The list of potential subjects is truly endless.

Speaking as a non-artist who is not entering such competitions, I find that it’s interesting to see the wide range of artists that enter pieces of artwork in such Christmas card competitions.  It’s often a combination of seasoned, established professional artists and those more amateur, untrained artists who create art for the sheer joy of it.  You’ll also see many children enter their artwork in these competitions, and very often, their entries are among the most impressive and moving, in my opinion.

It seems as if every few months, a Christmas card that was mailed long ago (fifty, sixty, or even 100 years in the past) resurfaces in the mail and is delivered. One can’t help but wonder where the cards were hiding all that time, but it sure is interesting to look at the stamps and cards from the past.

This one is a little different from those such things. Earlier this year, a Dutch schoolteacher found a real one-of-a-kind Christmas card in his family’s antique store near Amsterdam. The Christmas card (very similar to a postcard, actually) was signed by Anne Frank, a 13-year-old German girl whose diary later became the most widely-read Holocaust-related book.

This long-forgotten Christmas card was sent in 1937 and addressed to Samme Ledermann, one of Frank’s best friends. It was postmarked from Aachen, a town just across the Dutch border in Germany. The front of the card was a picture of a Christmas-decorated bell in front of a snow-covered field. There was no message beyond the address and signature.

Amazing!  The schoolteacher found the Christmas card while gathering materials for on Anne Frank for his school to mark Liberation Day, which marks the anniversary of the end of German occupation in World War II. Liberation Day takes place on May 5.  Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis for just over two years in a secret apartment in an Amsterdam office building. The Frank family and others in the apartment were arrested in August 1944 and deported to Auschwitz. Anne died in a concentration camp just two weeks before the camp was liberated in March 1945.

One of our Christmas card categories that grows every year
is our animal Christmas card category. We have everything from deer and dogs,
to dolphins, moose, soaring eagles, penguins and polar bears. I have to say
that the polar bear Christmas cards have become extremely popular.

Every year they seem to get cuter as artists come up with new ideas. We
actually have a number of our polar bears featured in the humorous Christmas
card category as the artist has given some of these creatures personalities
which shows up in the pictures depicted on the Christmas cards.

If you are an animal lover looking for cute Christmas cards to send to your
family and friends you can find some real cute ones here at www.DesignCrafters.com

Over the next few weeks I will be highlighting some of our
Christmas card categories.  What we are most proud of this year is our new
category of printed photo Christmas cards. We had an artist design our own line
of Christmas cards for this special category. We had a few of this type of card
that was offered by one of our suppliers the last couple of years and found
that they were extremely popular, so decided to expand our own line.

We now have 19 new printed photo Christmas cards that we have added to the few we
already have offered by one of our suppliers. We knew we had a hit immediately.
What has surprised us is that we figured they would be mostly used by families
with family pictures and pictures of the kids, etc. However, we have found that
more and more businesses are using these Christmas cards to send photos of their office
staff. You really should check out our assortment of new Christmas Photo cards
to see if any of them will work for you. You will not find any of our DCP Photo
card line anywhere else as they are exclusively sold by Design Crafters.