Merry Christmas!

Technically Christmas Eve, but close enough!  I hope wherever you are, you're taking some time to enjoy the holiday, pretty lights, and a warm drink.  I'll be heading up the road to Jake and Jill's for their annual Christmas Eve party and then heading home to go to bed early for Santa!

By now I hope everyone received our Christmas card (and if not, send us your address!), but I thought I'd share some behind the scenes information, outtakes, and how everything came together. We really did have a lot of fun.

I'm not sure when we started thinking about our Christmas card.  Originally I think we were just going to use a wedding picture, but then at some point I started thinking about doing something with Christmas lights.  I wasn't sure what, but we certainly had enough sets of them lying around.   So the first thing we did was push all of our furniture out of the center of our living room, which gave us a big empty space to work with.  And then I gave Tom permission to wrap me up in them. I think he had a bit of fun:

So that was fun, but after a while we decided both of us should be wrapped up.  However, that created a new problem.  We'd been using the automatic timer on our camera, which gives you about 10 seconds to run into frame before the picture is taken.  Tom would set the camera up, and then run over and pick up his end of the lights.  Easy.  If we were both tied up, though, how would we run/hop back and forth?  We ended up using our GoPRO.  Seriously, this is one of our new favorite toys.  There's a setting on it which will take photos every 10 seconds, but it also takes a video as it's happening.  Which means...there is a video of us trying to figure out how to wrap ourselves in lights!  You're welcome!

Once we had all the pictures, I experimented with taking out the background and adding in some text.  I used Minted for the final design and printing.  I loved the nod to the fact that we were newlyweds and this is our first married Christmas, but it's still a fairly traditional and simple Christmas card at the same time. 

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Overall we're really excited about how things came out, and we hope you loved them too! 

And now for some ideas that didn't quite make the cut:

We tried to include Maia. She wasn't feeling the Christmas spirit

We tried to include Maia. She wasn't feeling the Christmas spirit

I don't know what we were going for here. Laziness?

I don't know what we were going for here. Laziness?

Pinterest fail. This wasn't quite the out of focus soft lights in the back we were going for

Pinterest fail. This wasn't quite the out of focus soft lights in the back we were going for

Tom wasn't quite ready to give up the lying on the ground idea.  He was having too much fun!

Tom wasn't quite ready to give up the lying on the ground idea.  He was having too much fun!

Merry Christmas from The Spearsons!

How are you spending the holiday? Do you have any special traditions on Christmas Eve?
What did you do for your Christmas card this year?