Christmas Card Photo Shoot

Oh, Christmas. You are my favorite time of year.

I didn’t always feel this way, especially when my mom used to make us take our family Christmas card picture in the middle of November. I’m sure I whined and complained more than once as I was growing up when the time came to take the picture each year. I mean really, what kid wants to stand still and smile constantly for an hour?

(Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating about that length of time.)

(A bit.)

However, what goes around comes around. For the past few years I’ve actually hand-drawn our Christmas cards. But now that there are three of us, I decided to go with a photo card this year. I’m sure it will be the first of many. I wonder if Riley will rebel against taking pictures for our card every year or if he will just go with it. At the very least I’m quite sure the kid will know exactly what a camera is and what it does well before he’s a year old.

You see, I sort of like to take pictures. It’s kind of my thing. So maybe he’ll be so used to his mother sticking a camera in his face for every little thing he does that he won’t mind an official Christmas card photo shoot once a year. We shall see. He did fairly well for his first one, which we actually broke up into two separate instances this past Sunday. (He had to nap in between.) Even though he’s not exactly smiling on demand yet, we got some good shots.

      

As for our actual Christmas card, I did some research on a few different sites a couple of weeks ago to see what was out there this year. I went to my old standby, Kodak Gallery, first. I didn’t see a single design that I really liked. There were 1 or 2 cards that I could have lived with, but they certainly didn’t knock my socks off. I also checked out Walgreens but didn’t find anything that blew me away on their site either.

Luckily, third time’s a charm. I went on the Shutterfly site and almost immediately discovered almost a dozen really great card designs. I narrowed them down to a few and thought I knew which one I wanted to go with. However, after looking at the 350 pictures my dad took during our photo shoot and picking out my favorites, I quickly realized the card I thought I wanted didn’t really work with the pictures I wanted. So I looked through Shutterfly’s options again and found a great-looking design that I had previously skipped over but that I knew would work really well with the shots I wanted to use.

After all of that, I think I am going to switch all of my photo-related activities (picture storing and sharing, photo gifts, etc.) from Kodak to Shutterfly. I recently designed a photo book using Shutterfly and I was so pleased with the ease of the process and the resulting product. I also love giving photo calendars as gifts, and Shutterfly has great options for those. Add to that their huge selection of gorgeous holiday cards and numerous coupon offers and I’m hooked!

So what does our Christmas card look like this year? You’ll have to wait until I send them out in a few weeks before I post it online. But I can promise you it turned out really cute. :)

Thanks, Shutterfly!

P.S. – If you’re a blogger, visit http://bit.ly/sfly2010 for instructions on how to receive 50 free holiday cards from Shutterfly!