How is it Weekly Wednesday already…?! Decembers are nuts for those who own businesses with physical products ((or as I hear: for those who have children here in the USA/ Midwest)), so this year is no different than usual in that way.
As most of you know from our 8 years of blogging on here// past 10 Christmases of doing this that we always do a ridiculous Holiday Family Portrait in our same outfits evvvvvery year. This year was no different as we nearly ran out of time while working on client weddings, Portraiture, and products this November & December and almost ran out of time for ourselves. Because of that, we rebranded our Xmas card to a fully New Year’s card to help us keep them getting out to everyone from California to Rhode Island to Europe on time-! Without further adieu: Our 2023 card-!
For the past 10 holidays we’ve always taken our holiday photo on a shoreline, but this year we added a bit of Photoshop magic with magenta pink to replace all of the red in all 5 of our family’s outfits. Our 1st Self-Portrait of us doing this was taken by us out by our homes in Santa Barbara, California at our favorite beach (complete with a nearly-impossible-to-make sand snowman, giant thrifted nutcracker, thrifted yellow silk ornaments, a giant ocean seaweed as garland, thrifted tree, thrifted Christmas Santa hats & gloves, & our outfits that we recycle every year). This year’s was *for a 3rd time ever* taken at our river shoreline at our house here in South Bend, Indiana-! The snow really didn’t come this December and we missed our tiny November snow window (just a few days in Nov), so autumn leaves during the last couple days of Autumn it was!
Previous years (seen above) have included our holiday portrait at a “small,” more private lake in Southwest Michigan (3 times) as well as at a literal Lake Michigan beach in Southwest Michigan (State Park- 3 times as well). We prefer no one witness our weirdness with this as we juggle so much to try to make the image, but obviously when photographing these on a weekend, in California, etc at public state beaches, we’ve been met with a ridiculous amount of giddiness, confusion, and general glee from strangers (always with people taking photos on their cell phones & once with a girl running after our car (which was full of our tired 3 pets) to ask if we had a business card so she could see the final outcome).
Props are always what cause the biggest nightmare for us (yes- much, much more difficult than photographing our 3 sweet pets). We used to bring our vintage Santa blow mold (years 5 & 7), but stopped bringing him. We’ve tried to include beach-y fake palms to mimic California, but have since moved on to a tiny white Christmas tree. We brought our dog’s original moose stuffed huge toy once, but when we started including our pets (who should have actually started being included in our 2nd card with having adopted Kevin the cat right before it// Coco by card #3) too many props began to be a burden, so we narrowed it down to mainly just the 5 of us and the tiny tree. We were all good to go OF COURSE until 2020’s Bubble card. When we’d walked the tree out that year out many of the bulbs fell off in the extreme winter wind and shattered. With the fun, pastel bulbs no longer being sold at Michael’s, Jason the next year luckily finally found some similarly colored plastic & foam ones, so we’ve been back in business for our last 3 cards as usual. PUTTING ORNAMENTS ON THE TREE outdoors in full ice-wind often had us lose feeling in many appendages over the years in those snowy photos (especially the ones AT a Lake Michigan State Park), so by this point we pre-bulb/ ornament the tree when possible and THEN bring it out fully dressed (and with us in layers over our bathing suits).
This is a SCIENCE, people (**so fund the fine arts like the sciences, PLEASE).
Happy Holidays// no to war & citizen murders. <3 Freedom of atheism, gender, race, & all religions! Happy 2023 & onto 2024!