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I’ve shared my tips for ordering family holiday cards in the past — but something we’ve never talked about is the various holiday card styles out there. What is yours (if any)?
A Few of the Main Family Holiday Card Styles
There are a few main holiday card styles I can think of right off the bat:
The collage of family photos. This is what we do (obviously). While we text the grandparents and uncle continually if there’s a particularly cute picture, I don’t tend to share a lot of photos of my kids on my personal Facebook page or other social media. So I feel like a collage of family photos works for us — you get to see a bit about our year, and there’s no pressure to get everyone smiling at the same time.
The family photo shoot. I have some friends who do this — they’re always lovely! I back away from these because, while it would be amazing to get all glammed up and take a photo, I can’t be bothered to find matching flannel / velvet / whatever outfits for the family — and my boys would totally whine at this interruption of their weekend screen time.
The ENTIRE family group photo. We have a few friends who’ve focused their holiday cards around photos of them, their parents, their siblings, and about 30 other people who I’m assuming are family. I’m happy they got to have a whole family reunion — but I always wonder if they send something else to family members that year since, presumably, they all already have that photo set.
The photographic story tellers. I have a few friends who do this, arranging photos in a way that takes you through the family’s year. It’s great — short, simple, friendly. This, of course, presumes you’ve had an eventful year and have not been COVID cautious hermits (like, er, us). (We’ve been venturing out a lot more since everyone is vaxxed and boosted, though.)
The newsletter writers. I love the newsletters! I tend to get them from distant family members, as well as writer friends who also travel a ton or take on fun projects. I will say that I think one page is enough for a family newsletter, but maybe that’s just me.
The creative souls. I’m sure there are other options here — the viral Holderness Christmas Jammy video comes to mind.
The crickets. You know your friends still EXIST… you just haven’t gotten anything from them in a long while. Maybe you’ve fallen off the holiday card list, maybe they got busy, or maybe they’ve decided holiday cards are stupid. Ah well! (If I still feel close to these people I keep them on our holiday card list anyway — but if not, I tend to remove them.)
The store bought holiday card people. I tend to think of these as something that accompanies a newsletter, OR as a “reactive card” — i.e., you sent them one and they feel like they have to send you something, so you get a store bought holiday card with, for example, a cardinal on it. (I actually fit in this category when I was single — and might return to it once the kids are grown — we’ll see!)
The artsy / homemade holiday card. I almost forgot about this one because I haven’t received a card like this in years — but sometimes people decide to turn their holiday card into a craft project, which inevitably looks lovely. Another version of this: using your child’s artwork.
Readers, what’s your holiday card style? Have you gone through several over the years?
Images via Shutterfly (2022 collection). Social media images (storebought white “Seasons Greetings” card on wood table, surrounded by snow-covered pinecones) via Stencil.
SC says
We do a family photo shoot every year and use it for Christmas cards, and also get prints of the good ones for Christmas gifts for grandparents (and they get other stuff). It works well for us because we’re terrible about getting photos of the whole family, or even getting anything other than candid shots. We usually book a 30-minute session, which is about all the attention span either I or my kid have for photos. (Even then, we bribe the kid into cooperation.)
We have never planned or coordinated our outfits before the morning of the photo shoot. We always wear regular clothes from our closet, and we coordinate by starting with solid neutrals and then adding a little color to each outfit.
Boston Legal Eagle says
Yes, this is us too. Holiday cards are shots of us from the family photo shoot. We don’t really match, but somewhat coordinate in that everyone is usually in jeans and a sweater (we’re in New England, and do outdoors in the fall). The pictures usually come out beautiful and I like having the annual tradition. Hopefully my kids will humor us for at least a few more years! The cards we get from others are probably 60% professional family photos, 30% family collage pics, and a few cards. I personally don’t care if the cards I get are personalized or not – I mostly just want to see pics of my friends’ families as they grow up.
Anon says
This is us too. Our outfits get coordinated more like a week in advanced but only because our photographer hassles me about it via text incessantly. We don’t match and rarely coordinate well.
My parents are newsletter people and it’s big cringe to me. I’m sure this isn’t everywhere but the newsletters my parents sent and received were incredibly smug and braggy.
Anon says
Everyone*
SC says
Planning outfits the weekend before would definitely be preferable for me. Part of our tradition is me saying something like, “This year, we need to plan the outfits earlier, it’s too stressful for me to do it the morning of.” And the second half of that tradition is us planning our outfits on the morning of the photo shoot.
Anonymous says
We do family photo collage. I loooove getting picture Christmas cards (have no opinion on whether they are personally signed or addressed or not!). Am fairly indifferent about non photo cards, honestly if it’s just a signature it feels like a waste.
Anonymous says
We do a three or four panel cartoon/comic strip type design that contains scenes from the past year. All my husbands idea! No traditional photo. We found an artist that does this for us. We send him a very rough idea of what to put in each one, and some current pictures of us so he has an idea of what we currently look like. He puts together a sketch for our approval, and the final product is a JPEG color imagine that we have printed on cards.
HSAL says
I love this!
Anonymous says
This is so cool!
ToS says
We use cards to send a personal note and enclose school and family photos. This year we went to a large national park for our family vacation and were able to take candids with another couple (they stopped and liked the idea) with the park entrance sign. Sometimes we have a note, but often it’s just a quick message in the card. We send more detail to people who are not on social media, for obvious reasons.
Anonymous says
Hey super late comment but thank you for this post! My husband has wanted to do holiday cards since our son was born, but we never got our act together and got it done.
This year the kid is three and I saw this article. I didn’t have the time or bandwidth to get it done but I forwarded this article to my husband and noted the “collage of photos” option, which eliminated the need for a family photo shoot.
He hopped onto Vistaprint and designed some great cards that we even mostly managed to send on time!
Progress, not perfection, but still great progress!