A Christmas Card Tradition

 

Roland and I created, addressed, and sent our Christmas cards this past weekend. Actually, I did most of the creating, but Roland had significant input. In fact, our Christmas card tradition sprung from one of his ideas.

On a trip to Greece and Turkey in 2006, we spent some time at the Ephesus Museum in a small town outside of Ephesus. While there, Roland took a photo of a busted up statue of Ceasar Augustus. We were sending out commercial Christmas cards at the time and continued to do so through 2009. By 2010, however, I had started making notecards from some of my photos, and we decided to create our own Christmas cards instead of buying them. Then Roland had the idea of using his photo of Ceasar Augustus with “Ceasar’s Greetings” on the front and Luke 2:1-7 on the inside. That’s the scripture that tells us it was a decree from Ceasar Augustus that brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. Here is the front of that card:

From 2011–2014, most of our Christmas cards used nativity scenes found at various places in the Midwest, although 2015 was a Bernardino Luini painting from the Louvre that I took during a brief stop in Paris that year, and 2017 was a stained-glass window from a church in Normandy, which I took during that same trip.

After that, we decided we would try to use religious photos from the trips we had taken during the year. We were mostly successful. We even had a photo from our 2020 trip, which we squeezed in just before the pandemic shut everything down. We were traveling again by the end of 2021, but that trip to Africa produced no appropriate photos, so we had to dig into my photo archives for a photo taken in Florence, Italy in 2018. Last year we were back on track, and this year we had three photos to choose from—one from Melbourne and two from Ireland. We ended up using the one at the top of this post.

Let’s hope that next year yields some equally good choices.

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The photo at the head of this blog is a painting on exhibit at Kilkenny Castle in Kilkenny, Republic of Ireland, and I photographed it while we were there in May. The card next to the painting identified it as “Madonna and Child—Artist: after Carlo Dolci (1616-86).”