Christmas cards 2013

Friends! Thank you so much for your kind input on my first Christmas card post. You guys are just the best. I loved hearing about your plans for your own cards, and about how much you love Minted, too! Here’s how the voting ended up this year:

I could easily have seen us choosing any of the three top vote-getters. However, we ended up going with a late-breaking photo, and then choosing a totally new design to complement it!

It’s the Winter Pines card by Alethea & Ruth. We really liked this design because it communicated well what we wanted to wish our loved ones — peace, love, and joy. The photo is by Bryce Covey, taken at our friends’ wedding. (By the way, that’s one of my best tricks for getting a good photo if you don’t have the budget for an individual session — wedding photographers are usually happy to take quick couple or family portraits during cocktail hour when not much else is going on, and everyone’s already dressed up!)

Here’s a peek at our second annual family newsletter. Many of you asked whether it would be back, and here it is! By the way, I COMPLETELY forgot to follow up after this post, but we are indeed an aunt and uncle!! Tegan was born on December 12, and she’s so cute — we just got back from spending the weekend with her and the rest of my family!

One other thing I wanted to mention — it’s important to us that our Christmas cards are not all about us. We send them out at Christmas to share our joy at the birth of our Savior with the people we love the most, and we want to remind people of that in a personal way. That’s why we include a few thoughts on what Christmas means to us. It’s also good for us to stop and put it into words!

Each card got dressed up with an address and some washi tape. I had the perfect mint, jade, and kelly green rolls already in my stash!

Not one of our cards goes out without a personal note (probably a holdover from my childhood — I can remember sitting around the kitchen table with my siblings and parents, signing what seemed like hundreds of letters from a very young age!). Here’s one for y’all:

Yes, I had some help sending these out :) Hope you love them!