The Holiday Card

I remember as a child watching my mom write out holiday cards to friends and family.  She would write long notes in beautiful note cards and send them off.  Fast forward a few decades and the clear trend is to send photo cards these days.  I have heard a lot of complaining (OK, mostly on Facebook) about how impersonal these cards are, how expensive they are, what a waste of paper cards in general can be, and so on.  And it's true, many people, including me, send a pre-printed card in an envelope with a printed address label.  There's no hand-written anything, no personal sentiment, just the same card and general holiday note to everyone on the list.  I understand the complaint but I disagree that it's a waste.  In fact, I love checking the mail in December.  I love pulling out all of the holiday cards and opening them up to see smiling face after face.  I love the holiday letters, cheesy and all, I love seeing how much children grow, and I love hearing from people that I may not have been good enough about keeping up with during the rest of the year.  And sometimes I'll even pull out my box of old holiday cards and look at the pictures over the years.  Remarkable how a tiny baby one year is often a big kid holding a new sibling a few years later.  It never feels like that much time has passed.

And so every year in the late fall, we meet up with our dear friend Franklin who happens to be a great photographer for a family holiday shoot.  It often happens quite spur of the moment - the moment comes when we have time and he has time and the mood just strikes us.  I've gotten my entire family dressed in quasi-matching outfits in less than 10 minutes in years past!  Last year, we couldn't get a smile out of Ella until I promised her some of "those red and green things" (i.e. M&Ms) and she lit it up while Franklin snapped away.

This year, I'd been thinking about doing the shoot somewhere that really highlighted Durham and I had my eye on the American Tobacco Complex, a renovated area of downtown with plenty of historic features and interesting architectural details.  Here are a few of the outtakes, and then finally, the finished card.  I hope that the people who got it enjoyed the photos of the growing kids and know that even if the sentiment wasn't hand-written, it was heartfelt.

A great view of several of the old buildings in the background:

Gorgeous fall colors and Dash breakin' it down:

The blue-eyed boy:

The sweetest girl:

Ella, starting to lose her cool with the endless smiling:

And, finally, the winner! 

 

Random acts of Ella art

Ella really loves art as I've mentioned many times before.  Her latest obsessions are scissors and tape.  She has pretty well mastered kid scissors and spends a great deal of time cutting up pieces of paper into various shapes and sizes.  She has trouble with rolls of tape but I bought her a pop-up tape dispenser and now our only problem is the second mortgage we will have to take out on our house to pay for all the refills she goes through.  The best part of her creative genius, though, is that she makes new pieces of art and tapes them up around the house for us to find.  This is what I found on the porch door recently:

Young hoarder?

I count 3 pacifiers in Dash's crib and I have no idea how he got all of them in there.  Is he too young to be a hoarder? 

The Ornament

Ella spent the afternoon with her Aunt Leah (Bebe) recently while I took Dash to his 12-month check-up. 

An aside:  after months of being potty-trained, Ella somehow managed to both pee and poop on the floor of the doctor's office at a previous Dash check-up.  Since that horrendous day (do you really want to be on your hands and knees scrubbing an exam room floor at a pediatrician's office? No, me neither), I have decided that taking them separately is preferable.

But back to the crafting fun.  I'd bought a little craft kit to make a gingerbread man ornament with a picture in the middle.  I didn't have a photo printed but I figured we could add it later.  When I got home, though, I found that Ella had created something a thousand times better.  When there wasn't a photo available, she announced to Aunt Bebe that she could just draw a picture of herself.  Which she did.  And it now hangs proudly on our tree.  Kind of looks like the gingerbread man (woman?) is pregnant with a smiling seal, doesn't it?  I love it.