Christmas cards are kind of our thang as one of my friends recently put it, so when folks said there was no way we could possibly top last year’s card, Chip and I gladly accepted that challenge. This past Christmas, we already had our card all figured out by mid-summer, so when we returned from our trip to California in August without any ideas, I was starting to panic.
A few weeks later in September, Chip and I spent the weekend in New Hampshire for work. While on a hike at Arethusa Falls that Saturday, out of the blue, Chip said, “We need to do something with lemons. Like a lemonade stand or something with a really subtle message.” I liked it. We couldn’t exactly ignore the events of the past year either, but at the same time, our sob story gets really old really quickly, most especially to ourselves, so neither of us wanted to play (or print and send) the overt “cancer card” this year. Alas, we had a starting point. Inspiration. We discussed the lemon concept a little more and finally Chip said he had gotten us started but for me to take over from there and add my artistic approach to the lemon theme. I knew I could work with this and make it a little fun and a little serious all at the same time.
I liked the idea of the lemonade stand, but I couldn’t figure out how to photograph all four of us behind a table and it to look visually appealing. One of us really needed to be standing up holding Crosby in order for her to be seen and because we were going to be shooting in the winter, it was going to be hard to take that shot outside in the cold on dead grass and get the kids to cooperate. It didn’t make sense to have a lemonade stand set up inside of the house. So, the lemonade stand was nixed.
While foraging through the junk drawer in the kitchen for something one day, I stumbled upon my favorite magnet about scotch. We haven’t used it in awhile as we now have a stainless refrigerator. Then, I started digging through the drawer finding all the other magnets like it. That was it. A 50’s themed, witty card with a nod to cancer that would accurately capture our response to it. BOOM!
I then did a little prop shopping at Target, we recruited our friends Andrea and Adam to come over and shoot our photos one Sunday afternoon, I enlisted the talented folks at Xanthus Design to design and print our card, and voila!
Huge, huge thanks to Michael, Hud and the rest of the talented team at Xanthus Design: http://www.xanthusdesign.com
– Sheila
Team Kennett 