My 2022 Christmas Card

  It has become a bit of a tradition here on the blog to share my annual Christmas card. I have been making my own for the past five years now. If you’d like to take a look at what I’ve done in the past, here are cards from 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. I always try to use a picture on the front that is personal. I like to share a little bit of personal information on the inside whether it’s about my home and lifestyle, or a recipe. The back always has a picture of something memorable from the current year, or those past.

 This year’s card features a picture from the blog of one of my favorite tablescapes. At the time I was taking the pictures I had it in the back of my mind that one of them would make an excellent Christmas card, and I believe I was right. This is not the first time that I have used a blog post photo on a greeting card. You can find my Chinese New Year card from 2019 here where I did it for the first time and really liked the results.

 A popular side dish that I serve at Thanksgiving and Christmas is my Sugarplum Fairy Salad, so I decided to share the recipe in this year's card. As a consequence, I thought “Eat drink and be merry” would be the perfect inside sentiment.

  Stanley takes part this year in advising us to rest and not get stressed out over the holidays.

 Merry Christmas to all!

Chinese New Year Greetings!

Okay, here’s the thing -- Valentine’s Day is a tough day to celebrate when you’ve lost your sweetie. My first Valentine’s Day after Jim passed away was excruciating. I’d like to say that they’ve gotten better, but not so much. So I have decided, that instead of celebrating Valentine’s Day, I am going to, every year, celebrate a different holiday in the month of February. It gives me something to research and look forward to, and it may give you an idea or two as well.

This year I am celebrating Chinese New Year. I’m using the same tablescape that I used last year (that you can see here), but this year in addition to my dinner, I decided to send out Chinese New Year cards instead of Valentines. I had a blast! It was so much fun to get the old card-making creative juices flowing, as well as blow the dust off of my rubber stamps in order to decorate envelopes.

I got such an amazing outpouring of love from the Christmas cards that I sent last year (that you can see here), that I decided to, once again, design my own card, and came up with these. They were a lot of fun to do, and the recipe for pork dumplings is to die for! If you can’t read the recipe in the card, not to worry, I will be doing a blog post about them soon.

If you want to see some of my past greeting card efforts, click on the holidays named below. Meanwhile, I am looking for ideas for some of the more obscure holidays worth designing a card for and celebrating. Weigh in if you know of any. Who knows? I may accept your challenge!

Valentine Card

Halloween Card

Christmas Card

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