Christmas Mail

Every year since Michael and I moved in together in 2005, we’ve sent out photo Christmas cards to family and friends. I think. And every year, our list gets longer and longer.

Back in the day, the card consisted of a nice photo of the two of us that we had snapped sometime during the year. And once we got Tessa, she was featured, too.

When Nora came along, she became the star of our Christmas cards. I did my own photo shoots with her at home, dressed festively and posed nicely. Or, at least as well as you can pose a baby/toddler.

This year, I decided kind of last minute that I would like to do another family photo session with our favorite photographer. Just a mini session, to get a few snaps of our family at this point in time. Vivienne had already grown so much since her newborn photos three months before, and plus we could use the photos for our Christmas cards! I ran the idea past Michael, and luckily for us, our photographer was already planning a Saturday afternoon of mini sessions. So off we went, on a chilly Saturday in early November, to meet our photographer at one of the only spots that seemed to still have a ton of colorful leaves on the trees. We rushed around as she arranged us into different poses, and 20 minutes later, we packed back up into the car to get warm and head on our way. A week later, the photographer sent us our photos, and I was thrilled.

So worth the money. As family photos always are.

Next up was to choose a Christmas card design. Before I could get too far, I got an email from Tiny Prints, who generously offered to let me choose one of their cards for our family’s Christmas card this year. It was my lucky day! Tiny Prints has so many beautiful designs. I browsed their site for quite some time and “tried on” several cards, easily inserting our photos and customizing the cards. Eventually, I narrowed it down to three choices and showed them all to Michael. Here’s where we ended up:

The greatest thing was how many different photos we were able to use! There were so many good ones of the girls, and we had a few family favorites as well. It was so great to have a way to share a variety of them on our Christmas card.

We love the way the cards turned out. The photo/print quality is great, and the paper is nice and thick. We mailed them out earlier this week and we’ve had a lot of phone calls and texts about how wonderful they are. Thanks, Tiny Prints! If you’re running late and still don’t have you cards done, I encourage you to check them out.

Oh, and just a quick thing about mailing the square cards because I thought this was really cool. Normally, square cards cost more to mail—and that extra postage adds up! But Tiny Prints offers you the choice to get special rectangular envelopes that are made for square cards, but don’t require extra postage. The square cards still fit snugly into the envelopes, but you save money. And we could all stand to save a little money around the holidays, right?

As for the photos themselves, it’s nice that they aren’t Christmas themed, since we can now display these in our house all year round! There are some favorites that are definitely going up on our walls. And I am now convinced that fall really is the time of year to do family pics. Before now, we’ve had them done in spring, summer, and late summer, but never fall. The colors are outrageous. Although you’ve already seen several of them on the card, here are a few in their “full size”:

This photo is ridiculous. Michael and I were dying over it when we first saw it. It is my favorite photo of Nora of all time. I mean, who is this little girl? The hand, the hip, the HAIR… the sass! Just ridiculous.

I love this candid! Nora is all about giving her baby sister kisses—all day, every day. “I want to kiss her!” she tells us. And who are we to argue.

Nora’s pose kills me in this one, too. All the photographer said was, “Hug Mommy’s leg!” and somehow she ended up with her foot like that. I mean, REALLY?

Vivienne didn’t crack a real smile the entire time, but it was cold and she was probably a little bit like “what the heck, guys?!” Plus there was so much to look at out there, with us dancing around and the nature and all. Next time! I already can’t wait to get more pics done, hopefully in the spring. I wish we had more professional photos taken of us when Nora was smaller. It’s not that we don’t have that time documented—we have thousands and thousands of pictures we took ourselves—but now I can say with certainty that there is no such things as too many pro pics. No.such.thing.

Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays, everyone!