My husband and I have always enjoyed throwing a little spin on the traditional family Christmas card. Here's a recap of our favorites over the years.
2010
Our first DIY Christmas card is still one of our favorites. This was back before we had any kids and our dog was pretty much the star of the family - as you can see. Poor guy...
2013
We skipped a few years when we had our son and sent store-bought instead. But in 2013 we decided to play around with the lyrics from Little Drummer Boy.
2015
I decided to skip photos and illustrate our family this year instead. I always liked reading the long letters that my parents got at Christmas about how families we had known were doing. (We were a military family so many of our family friends didn't live near us anymore.) I decided to incorporate a very brief update of our year on this card as a part of the overall design.
2016
Considering I was 9 months pregnant at Christmas, I decided to forego any kind of family photo and lean into the fact that I had an uber baby belly with another illustration. We wanted to subtly announce our daughter's name even though she wasn't born yet, so I created a street sign with all of our names on it and, of course, we were all snowmen. I was just really tired and had 9 months of nausea during that pregnancy so I'm surprised we had any kind of Christmas card. Just looking at this pic makes me a little nauseated. Is that weird?
2017
We felt fully ready to embrace the crazy this year. I also decided to start including a brief update of each of our family members on the back because I love reading updates from other families, so I think part of me is hoping to start that trend again.
2018
This year we tossed around several ideas and finally landed on a nod to A Christmas Story (it was either this or the fragile lamp). We took each person's photo separately and I Photoshopped them all together along with a background I had digitally illustrated.
Who knows what next year will bring! If I remember I'll come back and update this each year.