One of my favorite things to do over the years has been to design our Christmas cards. Every year I’ve tried to some up with a way to make our cards special or clever. It never mattered to me that we didn’t have children to show off on our cards – it just meant we highlighted other things. But I will confess that it was fun to be able to create cards that captured our beautiful little girl this year. I was looking back through my old Christmas posts and realized that I’ve never actually shared our card designs. So I thought while I’m sharing this years Christmas card design – it might not be a bad idea to share the ones I have from years passed. (Of course I am missing all the cards I made before the house fire of 2011 but this is what I have from 2012 on).

2017 Christmas Card
So here’s this year’s card design! I’ll be honest and admit – I struggled to chose just a couple pictures – so we opted for a more elaborate card and did a trifold card with a collage inside this gave us the option to share a LOT of pictures of our little lady. It was certainly the right fit for this year’s card designw tih how much she’s grown and changed!

2016 Christmas Card
Last year things weren’t going well. We were still recovering from the adoption scam and feeling rather like things weren’t going to work out as we had hoped. Thus – the idea for last year’s card – tangled in a string of Christmas lights. It was simple but super fun to put together, and captured last year’s feelings pretty well.

2015 Christmas Card
We actually hadn’t taken many pictures together this year so we stuck to a simple card design. Straight forward and easy. We just used a couple of our favorite images from our mini session with my friend, Natalie.

2014 Christmas Card
This was the first year I did my first more creative card design. I wanted something that captured how exhausting this year felt. Our infertility journey had really intensified this year which was mentally and emotionally exhausting and my business was booming, which was fantastic! but also had me looking forward to the slow season in January to recover a bit. So the hubby and I “passed out” on the couch with my laptop open and a stack of books and comic books seemed rather appropriate. Of course, we included some standard portraits too for family who like that and a little message as well.

2013 Christmas Card
I decided to do a fun folded card so I could include a few more pictures and because I was curious about these fun die cut cards my lab offered. We had a few pictures taken this year both at a location near our home and at our home. Naturally, we included the dogs in these pictures too. And a little bit of info about the updates in our life since the house rebuild.

2012 Christmas Card
And this is the oldest card I still have. It was the year right after the fire so this seemed like a good simple card design. I nice 4×8 layout with a couple of our favorite pictures on the front and on the back a little month by month of the happenings of the year. This was fun to do with the house rebuild because it kind of let our family see how the house progress went that year.

So there you have it – a little peek at a bunch of our current and past Christmas cards. I do think these can be such a fun a special thing to create. I love doing them for my family and for my clients too! We’ve created some really cool cards over the years and I’m so excited to continue to get to make Christmas card fun in the future!