Extreme Xmas Cards

These are linked to individual pages about each card.

1989 Just a picture in someone's front yard Many many years ago, after moving to a new apartment, we sent our first humorous Christmas card, with a picture of ourselves standing in front of an enormous McMansion. Someone else's McMansion. It was so deeply humorous that no one understood it.

1990 Yellowstone snowstorm So the next year we were a little more obvious. Except it wasn't obvious to anyone but us that we were standing in a snowstorm.

1991 Whale watching By this time our friends and family were starting to get the idea that there was a joke involved, lame as it might be.

1992 Peace on earth This was an easy one.

1993 Flakes Finally, some people got this one. This was what we looked like when we traveled with all the baby stuff. We did confuse a few people who recognized our front door and wondered why we would be arriving, with all our vacation stuff, at our OWN house.

1994 Santa's little helpers Another obvious one, phew.

1995 Cherubs This one holds a special place as the first computer generated card. It took forever. Corel's cut-and-paste was so primitive that pasted objects couldn't be moved once placed. It took dozens of tries to get the heads right. And, my computer was so slow that every paste took almost a minute to process.

1996 Angels/devils I like the unfolding tree inside.

1997 Wallet Oh my gosh, another one that took forever. Every piece is a facsimile made with CorelDraw, not scanned. The challenge was to keep the whole thing flat enough to mail.

1998 Estate The puns only work if you've heard of Sew News and Town and Country magazines, and the travel writer Arthur Frommer. Apparently these are not well known cultural icons.

1999 Dream vacations The joke here is that all these vacations are a DREAM. With two small children and no money, who goes anywhere? I was really proud of how the background patterns lined up across the page folds.

2000 Jacob's ladder Another postage compromise. I would have liked to have made these with three or four flip panels, but the postage would have been a killer.

2001 Merry little Christmas My first pop up card! How cool is it that you can find a paper model of your car? All the ads on the envelope are family jokes. Notice Mrs. Claus sleeping and the reindeer kids in the back fighting. The point, of course, was that the Claus family was experiencing our holiday marathon roadtrip while we got to relax and deliver presents.

2002 Do it yourself Christmas card What happens when Mom gets a job? No one is home to make Christmas cards. The original concept was to use magnetic paper, but it was too expensive. I don't know how many people bothered to cut out the stickers. We had it on our refrigerator for ages.

2003 Turn, turn, turn Oh, I love this one. It's based on a design in one of Joan Irvine's books. There is a tutorial here.

2004 Sweets and nuts The design was inspired by a collapsing wallet my grandmother gave me when I was little, and by my mother's and my favorite Fanny Farmer candy selection called "Nuts, Crisp, and Chewy."

2005 Global greeting This was all about the snowglobe animation in the slideshow. The card snowglobe is exactly CD size. We printed the CD labels with the snowglobe picture so the card looked the same with or without the slideshow CD in place.

2006 Growing and changing I was feeling melancholy. Several recipients remarked on the relative seriousness of this card. Tutorial for the Reverse Waterfall Card is here.

2007 Messy Christmas The hardest part of this card was figuring out how to put the tunnel cards together in a logical sequence, incorporate a greeting, and still have the whole thing thin enough to mail. Tutorial here.

2008 Pine & Balsam Combine a balsam pillow and a slicefrom tree. Smells like Christmas spirit!

This form of card making needs a name! In the scrapbooking world there is traditional scrapbooking, digital scrapbooking, and hybrid scrapbooking. Is this hybrid cardmaking? I have found only a couple others people who have posted work that is similar in style.

Here is one of my favorites: Thomas Hoehn, from Kodak’s A Thousand Words blog.

Here are some with a more scrapbook-y perspective from Tip Junkie: Amazing Christmas Cards

Cloth, Paper, Scissors magazine featured artist Jane Maxwell's cards in the November/December 2007 issue and challenged readers to submit their cards. You can see Jane's art here: (no cards) Jane Maxwell and the result of the challenge here: Artful Holiday Cards