An Unlikely Christmas Letter

Time for a confession ... I love sending and receiving Christmas cards, and I especially love Christmas news letters.  There is just something so fun about knowing how my friends and their families are handling their lives, whether they live a mile or a hundred miles or a thousand miles away, I never stop being interested.  I have found, however, that not everyone feels the way I do.  I have therefore tried to trim my list to avoid offending old friends.

 

I do, however, try to be non traditional in my newsletters, and absolutely believe in short one. I have sent 'newspapers', songs, poems and alphabets, all suited to our lives in the previous 12 months. This year, my idea literally fell apart and became something different altogether. I had intended to take a lesson from my refrigerator. It has tickets, and pictures, and adds and invitations and coupons and they all add up to illustrate 'my life'!  Thus I decided to do a bulletin board of sorts for my letter this year. Unfortunately by the time the various elements were small enough to fit on a single sheet of paper that formed my mock bulletin board, they were also too small to read.

So instead, I just gathered all those faux scraps, the ones I made up to represent each of us, and tucked them in an envelope with the explanation above.   Thanks to Karen at Graphics Fairy, I was able to make the note attractive with this charming border..

 

It all sort of reminds me of those wonderful, big fat coffee table books you can get now, that have glasine envelopes full of mocked up copies of old letters, maps and documents that pertain to the subject matter of the book.  To the left is a phony 'newspaper' article about my grandson.   I mocked up a business card for one son, and wrote a realtor's note on a condo add for a daughter who is looking to buy!

 

I chose pictures that told stories, and made up the photo booth strip in the middle from a group of shots I took in secession.

Above is a faux award for my son who is always the life of the party ... often showing up in costume when no one else is. (He wore a gorilla costume to one of the grands birthdays this summer.)  He also wins costume awards at Halloween parties.  I found the great clown graphic at Graphics Fairy, of course.

 Then to 'announce' my daughter's pregnancy and due date I made up a fake 'request for personal leave' from work form.

With the scraps all tucked inside their envelope, it is ready to be added to the card, which will bear a personal note, and then to be sent to dear friends, who hopefully won't think I have lost it all- together this year.

 

Thanks for joining me and hopefully you also share my love of bits of news of those you love!!