Design Crafters

It goes to show you that even fame and fortune don’t mean a person doesn’t send out Christmas cards. It’s interesting to look around and see different Christmas cards sent out by the famous, whether they be actors, writers, politicians, or simply those who are famous for being famous.

A great many politicians in the United States stick with the safe choices for Christmas card designs: family photos or Scripture verses. You can’t really blame them for staying with these tried-and-true Christmas card styles, though. Potentially ordinary as they might be, ordinary is still far preferable than offensive, especially in politics!

Some recent holiday cards sent out by U.S. politicians include a great many family wedding photos (for example, politician, family, and daughter at daughter’s wedding), a posed family photo with coordinating outfits, or a pen-and-ink drawing of a politically relevant still-life scenery (such as the Rose Garden at the White House covered in snow).

Celebrities from other walks of life tend to be like “regular people” and stick with holiday themes, family photos, or even dressing up their pets like Santa Claus for their Christmas cards. While the non-politicians don’t have constituents to consider when selecting card designs, they still tend to opt for typical family photos or season-appropriate art. Artistic celebrities often use their own artwork for their Christmas cards.

After all, the message they’re wanting to send to friends and family is the same one that non-celebrities are sending with their Christmas cards: sending love and holiday wishes to people they care about during a very special time of year.

Do you find sending out your Christmas cards to be a chore? You’re not alone if you do – many folks find that the whole process of selecting the cards, writing the notes, addressing the envelopes, and stamping the cards to be a significant and somewhat overwhelming chore during the already jam-packed holidays.

If you are one such person, then be glad you’re not Father Naus in Michigan. He’s a college professor who sends just under 3,000 Christmas cards each year to former students, colleagues, friends, and even acquaintances. He believes strongly in the importance of letting people know they’re in your thoughts, as well as a Christmas card’s significance in a friendship. It might take up a great deal of his time during the holidays, but the odds are good that each and every one of the recipients of Father Naus’ Christmas cards are honored and happy to receive them in the mail. As a result of that, he’s happy to invest the time and effort in sending out nearly 3,000 Christmas cards each year.

The next time you groan at the thought of all the work that goes into sending your Christmas cards, remember Father Naus. Not only that, but remember how happy receiving a Christmas card from a friend or family makes you and, in turn, how happy receiving your Christmas card will make your family and friends. Giving someone happiness, no matter how large or small, is well worth the time and effort.

It’s official: Americans love our mothers and we show it by sending cards, gifts, and flowers galore to mark Mothers Day this coming Sunday. But Forbes Magazine has some news for us mothers: we’re number three. Mothers’ Day as a holiday ranks third on the list of holidays that trigger the most consumer spending here in the United States: gift certificates, flowers, jewelry, and meals out. What beats us moms out? No one should really be surprised that it is, of course, the big two — Christmas and Valentine’s Day – that top this coming Sunday’s Mother’s Day in consumer spending.

Even if we’re just talking about keeping the post office busy with our holiday mail, Christmas still ranks number one (Valentine’s, again, holds that number two spot). The United States Post Office estimates that, between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, it processes 100 million first-class cards (we’re assuming Christmas cards are a huge part of that number) in the mail. Americans keep our mailmen (and mailwomen) working hard delivering our Christmas cards.

But mothers, never fear. We still rate tops in our childrens’ hearts, the best place to be. So enjoy your lunch out with the kids, wearing your beautiful corsage, and clutching hand-made Mothers’ Day cards made with macaroni and glitter.

Do you ever see an amazing family photo where every single person is looking at the camera, smiling a lovely smile, no bra straps showing or crazy cowlicks making an appearance? We bet such a family photo would be part of a lot of peoples’ dream Christmas cards.

If you’ve ever wanted to have a family photo like that for your Christmas cards, but never did manage to get that perfect photo, then let us tell you a little secret: PhotoShop or similar photo editing software on your computer. PhotoShop has saved the day countless times in my family alone. With the wonder of photo editing software, we have photos where none of the kids are throwing fits or refusing to look at the camera. We have photos where the baby’s drooly chin is amazingly drool-free. We even have photos where the dogs are sitting quietly at our feet and looking at the camera along with every member of the family. All thanks to photo editing software.

It takes some trial and error, and a lot of practice, but it’s possible to remove stray hairs, unsightly blemishes, and clean up the dreaded red-eye from the camera’s flash. Did someone in your family blink just as the photo was taken? Now you can save the photo (and the day) by making small, subtle, but very effective edits to the digital photo. Professional photographers and ad agencies have been using photo editing software tricks for years, why not take advantage of the technology and end up with your all-time best family photo for your Christmas card this year?

Each holiday season, I bring my kids to the post office to help me pick out the Christmas stamps we’ll use to send out our family Christmas cards. They inevitably zero in on the secular stamps – reindeer, classic childrens’ toys, Christmas wreaths, Santa Claus – while I am the traditional one in the family and I love the Madonna and Child stamps that the United States Postal Service issues each year. In the end, I typically buy both stamp designs. That way everyone’s happy.

There is a bit of debate about which country first issued Christmas-themed postal stamps. Canada issued a stamp in 1898 that read “XMAS” superimposed over a world map, but Denmark contends that their “Christmas 1904” stamp was the first truly Christmas-themed stamp. Christmas-themed postal stamps have been used in the United States since 1962. The USPS began issuing the Madonna and Child stamps in 1966 for Americans to use to send their Christmas cards, but have occasionally replaced that design with other images (including one of George Washington praying), but ultimately the Post Office insists that the Madonna and Child stamps are replicas of great art, and not religious stamps.

One especially fun way to send out Christmas cards is to have them postmarked in cities and towns with names reflecting Christmas, including Santa Claus, Indiana; Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Silver Bell, Arizona; Christmas, Michigan; Christmas, Florida; Christmas Valley, Oregon; Snow, Oklahoma; and Nazareth, Michigan. Did you know that you can even have your Christmas cards postmarked from the North Pole (via the Fairbanks, Alaska, post office)? With a little planning, your family’s cards could be the hit of the season.

This coming winter will mark the 165^th anniversary of the creation of the first Christmas card. History shows that Sir Henry Cole — then-director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England – commissioned an artist to create a card that he could send to his friends for Christmas. What inspired Sir Henry to think up the idea in the first place? He realized that he was too busy to write a holiday letter to each and every one of his friends as he had previous Christmases. And so the Christmas card was born!

As brand-new to the world as the concept of Christmas cards were in 1843, the cards managed to cause an uproar. Not just over the brilliant idea of the cards itself, but because the image on the front of Sir Henry’s card was of a family enjoying their holiday dinner while a child sipped wine. Many were outraged and Sir Henry’s cards were declared to be “fostering moral corruption in children.”

Nonetheless, the idea of Christmas cards took off in popularity almost immediately. At first, Christmas cards with religious themes were the only ones available, but it didn’t take long for other Christmas card themes to appear on the market. Nowadays, of course, you can find a Christmas card in just about any theme or motif you could dream up: nature, with family photos, corporate, patriotic, humorous, sports-themed, luxurious, classic, cartoon characters, and of course featuring Santa Claus in his many, jolly forms.

So this winter, don’t forget to raise a cup of eggnog to toast Sir Henry’s brilliant idea!

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.

One such postal find was a little more out of the ordinary, though. Recently, 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.

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.

We’re nearing summertime when schools are out and our kids are home all day long. In an ideal world, the kids home from school will be doing helpful things around the house like mowing the lawn or putting clean dishes away, but the odds are fairly high that that won’t happen. Instead, it’s a strong possibility that they’ll just lie on the floor moaning about how bored they are and how they have nothing to do, right?

Here’s a simple and fun suggestion to help ward off the dreaded “I’m Bored!” complaints this summer: collage time! Maybe you think you don’t have the supplies necessary for crafting collages, but think again. Scissors, paper (construction paper or even paper from your computer printer), a bit of glue, and something pretty to cut up, and you’re good to go. In my household, I have found that old magazines and old Christmas cards we’ve received years ago help to make the best photo collages.

My kids just love assembling intricate collages using magazine pages and pretty Christmas cards – sometimes they put together collages of many shades of the same color, sometimes they put together collages using nothing but photos of animals, sometimes they look for family photos from Christmas cards to make one big happy family collage.

Even if you think your kids won’t find this a fun way to spend an afternoon, give it a try anyhow. You might be pleasantly surprised at how quickly a rainy summer afternoon goes by when you and the kids are exercising your artistic sides.

Believe it or not, in some circles, writing The Best Christmas Card Letter to enclose with your family’s Christmas card makes for some heavy competition. No one wants to be that family with the letter that is unintentionally hilarious in its dour and bland — or even braggy — recounting of the past year, after all. No, the big rewards come with the wittiest letters, the ones that best reflect the sending family’s personalities while also giving a quick (trust us, keep it to a page) written snapshot of the past year’s events.

What goes into a winning Christmas card letter, you ask? Endless debates rage about this very topic. Some people love reading the newsy types of letters, while others argue that their favorites are the letters that rhyme. The funny letters are skyrocketing in popularity (both to send and to receive), as are the ironic or very clever ones. You’ll occasionally see themed letters, top ten letters, letters as jigsaw puzzles, and even letters with multiple choice quizzes about the family’s year. One extremely popular letter format is to use a photo essay approach to the year-end wrap-up—after all, pictures speak a thousand words, right?

The point is that when it comes to the letter to accompany your Christmas card, you can’t please every single person in your audience, but if you start off by pleasing yourself, you’re likely doing fine….but we would hasten to add that using red or green somewhere in the letter is a great start.

And perhaps a photo of the family dog wearing a Santa hat — that can’t hurt.

The problem with going to someplace like the Forbidden City is that you end up with so many incredible pictures, it’s hard to choose which one to use for your Christmas photo greeting cards. Unless of course you’re like Sam.

Sam is a college student I ran across who came across the opportunity to do some service in China. This was especially a big deal as he never in his life had even been outside his own state. One of the “must visit” places was the Forbidden City. He packed up his 35mm camera, jumped on the plane, visited the Forbidden City and apparently got some fantastic photos. Or so he claims. Unfortunately his luggage with the film, camera and pictures mysteriously disappeared and was never recovered. His intention was to scan these pictures (making them digital) and turn them into photo cards. For once in his life he could share his adventures, instead of everyone telling him about theirs.

You can probably imagine his disappointment when it all disappeared. But that didn’t stop him. He was lucky enough to have a friend who knew just what to do. They actually went online, downloaded a picture of The Forbidden City and super imposed himself into the picture.

It apparently looked real, convincing everyone and allowing him to still share his adventure.