Unique Family Christmas Cards

I absolutely love getting Christmas cards. Each year, I hang a ribbon on our wall and use clothes pins to attach each card that is delivered, slowing down to scan them each time I walk by. Checking the mailbox becomes the highlight of my day.

When my husband and I first got married, I was eager to finally send my own family Christmas card. Well, my husband wasn’t too excited about the idea. In his opinion they were all “kind of boring,” and he didn’t want to be “that” couple. I promised him though, that if we were going to send them out, I’d go along with doing something a little different. And so, our unique Christmas card tradition began.

Each year, usually in September or October, I turn to my husband and say, “I think it’s time to start figuring out our Christmas card.” We then ping pong different ideas until we settle on a good starting point. I let my husband stretch his creative skills, sit down at his computer and work on a rough draft. He usually works late into the night for a couple days in a row, tinkering away on Photoshop, until he has some sort of a draft to show me. I don’t have the computer skills that he has but I am really good at offering critiques. I’m not sure if he would describe this as my greatest contribution but I am going to let the finished products speak for themselves. Together, I think we make a pretty good team though.

Let me take you on a stroll down memory lane to visit our Christmas cards’ past.

2013 – This is the year we first tested our ability to create a unique card. We decided to do a play on the words, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” but instead took selfies and changed the words. We took a few selfies in our driveway and used a Shutterfly template, customizing the words. This is quite tame compared to the years to come but we got a pretty good response from our recipients and thus sparked our drive to continue our unique card tradition.

2014

Our son’s first Christmas. We were elbows deep in new parenthood with our 8 month old son and decided to make him the star of our card. We tried to recreate a vintage Andy WiIliams Christmas album. I can still remember throwing this thick sweater on my baby, in the middle of a warm Los Angeles fall day, and scrambling around the house trying to get a “classic” looking picture of our very active son.

This is the original album cover that we used as inspiration.

2015

We had just listed our first home for sale and packed up our belongings into a U-Haul to put in storage. We were relocating to a new county and planned to live with and spend Christmas at my mom’s house while we house hunted for a new home. This card was a play on the movie Home Alone, but since we didn’t actually have a home to live in, we titled this card, “Homeless.”

2016

This one might take a little more explaining. It is still my husband’s favorite card to date. At the time we had just finished watching the first season of Stranger Things and, because it was the holiday season, my husband had just watched a Die Hard marathon (yes, he does consider it a Christmas movie). He wanted our card to have an action, sci-fi feel. He definitely nailed that but I am just not sure how many of our friends and family quite understood it when they opened the card. To this day, my husband claims that this one took the most time to create. Please enjoy our full length feature called, Stay Frosty.

2017

We added another son to our family this year and I can honestly say that this card ties for my top favorite. After last year’s action, sci-fi themed card, I told my husband that I wanted something “cuter.” We posed as Santa’s most IN-famous reindeer, booked and charged for various Christmas crimes. My youngest son, with those cute reindeer antlers, footie pajamas and chubby smile, gets me every time. (NOTE: my husband made this card himself so I don’t have a template to share)

2018

We were running out of time and the ideas just weren’t coming this year. This might have been because of the fact that we had two young kids and we just didn’t have the time to think. At the last minute though, an idea popped into our heads when I commented on the fact that I was stuck in a house of all boys. I was feeling “Claustrophobic.” We went to a local park, threw some Santa hats and beards on the boys and my friend snapped a picture which, to our relief, went over quite well that year.

2019

I was due to have my third baby on November 25th but he didn’t arrive until December 3rd. Because we did not find out his gender until he was born, we knew that the idea for the card was going to have to be very last minute. With the birth of a third boy we decided to do a spoof on the Christmas Carol and being haunted by three boys instead of ghosts. My husband did research to find the original movie poster for The Christmas Carol to replicate on our card. See the original movie poster here. This one also doubled as a birth announcement for our son.

2020

What a year 2020 was. We survived a new baby, being locked down from Covid, both my husband and I working from home and helping my son through distance learning. The only way to remember the year was being stuck at home with 3 crazy kids. What better phrase to sum up the craziness of 2020 than, “Oh There’s No Place Like Home for EVERYDAY!” My best friend came over to our house to take our picture and I told her I just wanted it to look chaotic. We got the shot in under five minutes!

2021

This year we decided to make a crossword puzzle with clues to share about what’s been going on in our lives. After solving the puzzle, some letters were used to unscramble the riddle on the back, “What have the Fenskes been up to this year?” … Snow Good! This picture involved prop snowballs and the ironic thing is that we took the pictures on a day that was 90 degrees in November.

Front of the card…

Back of the card…

2022

This year we decided to go with year book superlatives for a High School of Elves. This one took some props and a class picture day in our play room but I think it turned out pretty darn cute.

Some years we ask ourselves why we go through so much trouble to create these very time consuming cards. Around August/September the thought starts creeping into our minds that it is time to start getting inspired. Then, my husband spends hours on photoshop choosing the perfect font and colors or resizing pictures to make them just right. Some years we worry that we won’t come up with anything we and will have to disappoint our friends and family (and more so ourselves) that we won’t be sending a card. Or, that one of these years our boys might be “too cool” for this. But then, each year, when I unpack our Christmas decorations and pull out our old cards, to be hung in our house for the whole month, I can’t help but feel a huge sense of pride. We started our own holiday tradition that is pretty special to us.

Thanks to Shutterfly, we’ve been able to upload our designs on their custom template and print great quality cards. They have great sales throughout the season and actually the whole year too. Check them out if you have your own unique card that you’d like to print or use one of their many templates. We’ve used them for each of these cards and I can’t say enough good things about them.

Which Christmas card was your favorite. Leave me a comment below and let me know.