Christmas Card 2014

We’re back at it again this year, we’re saving on postage being environmentally friendly and putting our Christmas Card online.  There’s also the time factor.  It took me more than 8 hours to wrap the Christmas gifts that are being shipped to 3 places in two other states and being handed out here in MA.  Actually mail merging the labels for the over 100 names on our list, labeling, signing and then mailing the cards (maybe not in that exact order) is WAY more time than I have.  So, an hour or so of photo editing it is.

And so, I give you, our 2014 Christmas Card.

Most of you who know Geoff know that the Peanuts cartoons figured pretty heavily into his entire life childhood.  He actually identified with Charlie Brown quite a bit.  His first dog, a beagle, was named Franklin and Rerun is named, contrary to popular belief, after Rerun van Pelt, Lucy Van Pelt’s little brother.  Geoff’s two favorite dog breeds are beagles and dachshunds, so it seemed appropriate that as it is completely impossible to get Geoff and I in a photo together, ok, a serious Christmasy type photo, and also get Bucky, Thumbelina, Rerun, and Scratch that we’d let the Peanuts gang stand in for us.

Charles Schulz was really good at giving me material to work with.  There are about a million different versions of Charlie Brown and Snoopy out there on the internet doing various things, especially Christmas related things, that I had to work with.  I could even get Snoopy with a gun if I really wanted to.   See?

As Geoff and I would never let Rerun anywhere near a gun, these images of Snoopy weren’t terribly useful.  Finding images of Snoopy doing other things, like sleeping, skating, or hanging out doing Christmasy things were easier.  They were also much more Rerun-esque.  Especially the sleeping ones.

Things got a little more difficult with finding a suitable pic for Thumbelina.  If you didn’t know, Snoopy is one of eight pups, two of whom are female.  Here’s a family portrait.

Finally, Schulz was clearly not a cat person.  There’s only one cat that appears in the comics with any regularity, Frieda’s cat Faron.  Another is mentioned as the terror kitten from next door.  While that cat would have been ideal to be Scratch, he never shows up in the comic strip or in any of the TV specials.  (Though he is named World War II which somehow feels appropriate for Scratch.)  This is where my photo manipulation skills came in.  The two cats shown above, one being Bucky, the other being Scratch, are two different drawings by Schulz of Faron.  Naturally, the one sitting on Snoopy/Rerun is Scratch, the larger one sitting by himself is Bucky.

My only other option for a Schulz drawing of a cat was this one.

No so festive that.  I was also looking for a pic I remember from childhood of Lucy strangling Charlie Brown, but I couldn’t find it anywhere on the web.  To be fair, I only looked for a few minutes.  It too wasn’t very festive, but it’s about right for the normal Holiday Stress levels.  I did find this, though.

So there you have it.  Have a Merry Christmas, Blessed Yule, Happy Hanukkah, Great Festivus, Happy Kwanzaa, and an awesome anything else I may have missed.

~Kelly & Geoff