*** HAPPY HOLIDAYS! ***

To the left is our holiday card for 2007! I'm so proud because it's our first "custom" holiday card as a family. The hardest part was definitely coming up with the concept, the easy part was getting all the props and shooting it! Alex is a cheesemonger and has a very acute palate for cheese. The cheeses you see pictured here are: Jarlesburg Swiss, Aged Gouda, and Babybel. I had no idea what Gouda was until I met Alex, and now I know that it's one of my favorite cheeses!

Everyone asks: "are the cups photoshopped? did you drink all of them?" They aren't photoshopped (I'm kind of anti-photoshop when it comes to photography), I actually bought 24 cups for the shoot for $1.70 with nothing in them, however I have consumed at LEAST that many Starbucks drinks in the span of a month... which means I've basically been on an espresso drip the entire month of December. Green note: the cups were saved to be reused later on.

As for Misty, she was such a good dog for this shoot and for getting all dressed up and wrapped up in lights. I put the reindeer outfit on her early enough that she would look sufficiently unpleasant under the word "Merry". I hope you laugh as hard as I do when I look at this! I love her- and I never thought I could love a foo-foo kind of dog, but she's so wonderful, patient, and adorable that it's hard not to love her. If you didn't get a card this year, I'm sorry! We ordered 300 but there were still some people who accidentally got missed!! Special thanks to Samantha McGranahan, who has helped me with sooooo much more than our holiday card this year (more on her another time!)

As you can see from my Holiday Schedule, we are on our way to Michigan today! This is just the beginning of our multi-city tour of holiday adventures. I'll be back in the office on January 10th to finish up the projects that have been put on hold during the holiday season. While I'm away, I'll still check my email, albeit much more sporadically than normal, so I appreciate your patience while I take time out to spend with my families.

I may also be sending silly, ridiculous, and personal updates to the blog just for fun so you can see what the holidays are like with our various families. Hopefully the family is reading this now so that they'll be ready when the candid camera strikes!! HA! *I love you all and the fact that you let me get away with my antics... AND post it all on my blog for the world to see!!

Who really inspired me to create a custom holiday card this year was Annabel & Paul, one of my 2008 wedding couples in California!! Check out their way-more-awesome-than-mine holiday card from 2006 (rudolph) & 2007 (charlie brown)!! When you see a holiday card like this, you KNOW the wedding is going to be full of fun!!! (umm... no pressure, but now everyone will want to see what your wedding is like!) Annabel is a screenwriter and Paul edits commercial movie trailers, hence the appropriate content:



Aren't they adorable?! And I get to be their wedding photographer! Man, I'm lucky.

Annabel, you didn't know this... but in a recent holiday survey conducted by my family, Charlie Brown's Christmas was listed as my favorite holiday movie growing up! The Grinch is a close second. ;-)

Not everyone celebrates the holidays, so if the holidays just aren't your thing, you can tell everyone to go Scrooge themselves! I was tagged by Shawna Schuab to do the elf thing and pass it on, but I'm going to act like a Scrooge and break the chain! Bah Humbug! Click below if you feel like being a Scrooge too...


Damn I look good in gray sideburns... HA!