I’ve always been a sucker for a good holiday photo card.
Usually I consider our holiday card to be a sort of time capsule — a mandatory Christmas tradition. But this year, it just didn’t seem authentic to coordinate our outfits and pose in some random field or tree farm.
This year has been a crap shoot. Every single person knows this. So getting all dressed up for maybe the second time in eight months just didn’t seem like the right choice for us.
I tossed around the idea of not even sending a holiday card or letter. After all, what did we have to share? Nothing new had happened, and sending out a card updating our extended friends and family of our canceled vacations, gained weight, and pathetic lack of social interaction would be downright depressing.
But then I remembered an Instagram post I’d seen months ago. One of the influencers I follow had put each of her kids in a box and made a fun collage of their photos.
If there was ever a more accurate portrayal of our growing time in quarantine separated from society than sitting in isolation boxes, I couldn’t think of one.
We decided to give it a go
I roped my parents into my plans since they are our daily inner circle. It only seemed fitting to send a joint card this year. We wrangled the pets and spent the better part of a Saturday trying to create the picture I’d vividly painted in my mind — and what we got was pure magic.
It totally nailed the reality of our 2020 with a fun spin.
Thinking that I might not be the only one who thinks this 2020 in a box idea is fabulous, I decided to help you out with some practical tips and tricks to recreate it yourself:
Get a box
Seems simple enough, right? But it was a bit more challenging than I’d expected. We had to make sure that the box was big enough to hold us and had the appropriate dimensions to fit in a three by three photo collage. We ended up using a combination of a couple of dishwasher boxes we snagged from a retirement community and my dad and I did some DIY construction on them to create a single box that was roughly 3’ by 2.5’.
Download a collage app
It’s important that your end product can be printed as a 5” by 7” if you plan to have it made into an actual card. Not all collage apps have dimension specific layouts. I downloaded PicCollage and lucked out with their free 7-day trial.
Map out your interactions
Part of the fun (in my opinion) is the interactions between people in different boxes. Since photos are taken one at a time, these interactions have to be a bit planned out ahead of time. I did an ugly sketch on a scrap of paper the night before, showing who should be looking down or whispering to the right and where each person would be located in the final product. This eliminated most of the guesswork during the actual pictures.
Bring bribes
Our afternoon photo shoot turned out super fun and that was mostly thanks to the bribes for both puppies and humans. Being ready with dog treats and fruit snacks (and coffee flowing for the grown-ups) was our recipe for success.
Ready, set, print!
I’m usually a tried and true Costco fan for holiday cards. You can’t beat the quality for the price. Unfortunately, like most photo card printers, they don’t offer a layout without graphics or text on the front. I finally found Collage.com and created a card with just our box collage on the front with a simple border. They turned out amazing and I even snagged 60% off my first order!
This year was a real crap show. It would have been easy to forgo the holiday card completely and chalk it up to just another loss of 2020, but I’m so glad we didn’t. Instead, I look at this photo that represents our year perfectly. It’s a simple thing that brings me joy.
And during this unconventional holiday season, I hope it brings others joy too!
