The Holiday Card That Nobody Throws Away

Christmas cards · Orange County

Six photos. One of them silly.

A family of four, late November, and the leaves finally showed up.

Every December, one photo gets chosen. Not taken. Chosen. It rises out of the camera roll like a pope out of a conclave, white smoke and everything, and it gets the job: represent this family to everyone we know for a year.

This is a guide to the other kind of card. The kind that ends up kept, not filed in the wastebasket.

• Six photos, not one. Include the dog or one rambunctious toddler.
• Every holiday session lands in a week. Order cards that night.
• Thick paper. Real stamps. Plant it.
• Two or three sentences. To one person.

I

Just like your life, it's not about one moment

The best part of a book isn't the cover. It's every page after it.

Six windows, six kinds of photo:

• Everyone
• The two of you
• The kids together
• Each kid alone
• One silly one

Merry Christmas from the four of us

the littlest one had a plan. it was not my plan.

This family's littlest was a genuine wild child, and the card is better for it. In one frame he's picking berries, and I hope somebody told him they were poisonous. In another he has a leaf over his face. Both made the cut, because your aunt isn't judging the composition. She's looking for the kids exactly as she remembers them. Silly, shy, forever hiding their faces from the camera. Personality, not a mannequin.

II

The math runs backwards

Work back from the mailbox.

• Mailed by December 10
• Ordered by November 20, from your gallery
• Every session through the holidays is delivered in one week
• So shoot by November 13. A Matinee on November 8 means cards ordered by the 15th

The Matinee was built for this. Fifteen minutes, twenty-five images, $295. Dates below.

And the local catch, which surprises people every year: our trees do turn, just late and in two waves. The ornamentals at Jeffrey Open Space go first, the natives at Yorba wait until late November. The family above was shot the last week of November, which is why they have leaves. The full breakdown is here.

Card-ready dates

The Weekend Matinee, fall 2026

• October 11Carbon Canyon redwoods
• October 18Jeffrey Open Space
• October 25Huntington Beach pier
• November 8Yorba Regional

November 22 at Yorba works if you order the night the gallery lands. December 5 at Riley is a New Year's card, which is the only card in the pile in January.

Samantha · From AccountingI like cards better than emails. I can't sleep on an email.

See the dates

III

The card shop is inside your gallery

Pick the photos, pick a card, type your address, done.

No downloading, no uploading, no wondering whether the faces come out orange. They print from the real files. The night the gallery lands you can have cards moving before the kids are in bed.

IV

Paper does more work than the photo

Your family sees a few hundred photos a day and remembers none of them. A card gets held.

• Thick. It feels like it cost something because it did
• Matte, not gloss. Gloss shines like a menu
• A deckled edge. Your thumb finds it before your eyes do
• Letterpress or foil on the names, so you can feel them

The paper choices sit next to each card in the shop. A screen will lie to you about paper, so if you go off the menu, order samples first.

V

Red and green are allowed

So is Santa riding Rudolph like a bucking bronco.

So is Santa working his bulbous body down a chimney that could not possibly accommodate him. Blue and silver are allowed too. Hanukkah: it's lit. These are traditions and I'd never take them from you. Just don't let the tinsel be the whole card. The card is your family being themselves. Everything else is wrapping paper.

VI

Send a strip inside a real card

Four from the gallery, printed as a stack.

Four frames stacked, real photobooth proportions. I make these, and nobody has ever handed one back.

Pick four from your gallery, print a stack of strips, and one goes in every card. A strip is a story: four moments in order, and you can watch a face change across them. Slide it inside a card somebody actually designed, like the ones Red Cap Cards makes in Los Angeles with real illustrators, and you've sent something beautiful on the outside and yours on the inside.

Persnickety Prints prints them if you want to try it yourself. And if you want to really get someone, one real instant print. A piece of film that exists once, and now it's theirs.

VII

The envelope

It's the first thing anyone touches.

• A colored envelope, or a liner inside the flap
• Hand-address them. Bad handwriting is what twelve year olds are for
• Real stamps. Two small ones beat one big one

Square envelopes cost extra postage. Worth it. Just don't find out at the counter with sixty of them in a tote bag.

VIII

A card that turns into flowers

This is the best idea on the list.

Seed paper is handmade paper with wildflower seeds pressed into the pulp. Plant it, water it, and in the spring it comes back as black-eyed Susans and snapdragons. The only Christmas card that shows up twice.

It's weirdly perfect for here. Wildflowers go in the ground before the winter rains, so a card arriving December 12 lands at exactly the right moment. WeMade makes them by hand in a New Jersey kitchen, out of paper that was headed for the trash. Photos don't print well on seed paper, so the seed paper carries the message and the photos ride along as a strip.

Noodles · Editor in ChiefI usually don't like cards, but this one grew on me.

IX

Write less

Two brothers and a pile of late November leaves.

If the message could double as a LinkedIn post, cut it.

Two or three sentences, small and fun. "Ruby lost four teeth and picked up a British accent from a cartoon. Dad made latkes for the first time and it took a latke potatoes. Happy everything from the four of us."

A card hits different than a DM. It says hey, I literally got this printed, in real life, and went to that place from back in the day, what do you call it, oh right, a post office. All because I wanted to say hello.

X

Christmas in shorts

I grew up in Phoenix, then eight years in Portland. Never a white Christmas.

Portland managed an ice storm once. Not the same. Some years I'd fly home to Phoenix and step off the plane into a different world. Sun. My nephew in shorts.

Everyone's December looks different. What's the same is somebody you love opening something you made and knowing you thought of them. In a world where most things are disposable, something you can hold warms any house it lands in. Snowy or sunny.

Book a Weekend Matinee

$295 · 25 images · delivered in a week · October 11 through December 5

See the dates

Want the full hour and the whole gallery? Family sessions are here.