Holiday Cards, 2025

I spent several long weeks in August debating the right direction for my 2025 holiday card. Landscape or cityscape? What if I made an object instead of a scene? How abstract did I want the artwork to be? Should I keep to my usual holiday color palette or try something new? What about a typography experiment? How literal is too literal of a concept? Or will some recipients feel confused getting a “holiday card” that doesn’t look like the holidays at all?

…What if I made a bauble instead of a card this year? (That idea was quickly dismissed—too impractical—because of the complex shipping logistics that would entail.)

2025 was a hard year for so many of my friends and family. Almost everyone I knew was forced to make a difficult decision or a big sacrifice. There were lots of struggles to find stability. Just surviving in the present was hard, much less planning ahead for a better future. It felt important to share a message of hope and solidarity amidst this turmoil.

I eventually chose to make holiday garlands. Their traditional symbolism of life and hope are rooted in the dark, inhospitable depths of winter. For centuries, joy and natural beauty often felt distant in a time of dwindling light and warmth, but bringing a garland of leaves and branches into the home reminded our forebearers of nature’s persistence and the return of life in spring.

So maybe these cards could be a little reminder of the brighter future we were working towards.

Unexpectedly, I didn’t have enough purple paper to create the flowers for all 55 of the garlands I’d hoped to make. I was also running worryingly low on warm white cardstock. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d run out of paper. My stack of paper is more than a foot tall… alas.

Instead of finding a last-minute source for the right shade of purple paper, the easier solution was to make another color palette with the reds and greens I had readily available. As a bonus, I now had a set of more literal-colored holiday cards. Still, I had lingering doubts about whether the theme would be clear enough—mainly because the flowers ended up looking quite abstract. I should’ve know that would happen, because most of my flower pieces (especially the ones made from loose brushstrokes) don’t quite read as flowers. There’s something about the layering of all the tiny, organic-shaped pieces that distracts from the flower shape. What if people couldn’t make out the garlands?

Luckily, no one had trouble making out the flowers. Thank you to my friends and family for your open and appreciative minds!