Christmas cards might be one of my favorite Christmas traditions – sending them and receiving them. Some years, we have a plan in advance – other times, we are fighting against time to get it printed before Christmas. This year, we were lucky to get them done!

Let me give you a little background info on how this card came to be – because I’m often asked how we come up with these. I had hoped to use our Halloween costumes on our card (if you’ve been around for some time, you’ll remember we’ve done this many times) but there were some in the family that weren’t loving the idea of being in spandex and masks for our card this year. I was busy with the Turkey Trot and didn’t leave much time for any creative process. Steve sat down with me one evening as we brainstormed what represented our family this year. And he came up with the phrase. With the phrase/theme of the card nailed down, I immediately knew I could make it fun and base it around candy. I spent the next morning running around town picking up candy/treats.

We had already created a spinning card a few years back when we wrapped our kids in lights so I knew I had a template that the printer was familiar with – so we decided a spinning card was the winner. That evening, in a matter of one hour, I ransacked the kids closets to find clothing in the colors of the rainbow and I shot each kid individually and Hallie shot my photos. (Believe it or not, I picked the colors of the card before I went through their closets and by some small miracle, we had clothing that matched every color – except one, in which we photoshopped it to match, and even when I’ve had people guess which one was photoshopped, they don’t guess correctly!) Steve was gone for the evening so we caught him the next morning before he flew out for a work trip and by that evening the card was done and ready to send to print. So within 72 hours we had gone from no ideas, to a completed card. It rarely works like that – but the stars aligned for us this year.

It was fun to see the finished card hanging in the homes of friends and family and to see who was being featured! Of course, I had a few children (I won’t name any names) who liked to rotate the image to them in every house they visited.