Well, it’s that time again, which means designing the annual Christmas card. Trying to come up with something different every year for the last 30-odd years hasn’t been easy.
Admittedly for the first 10 years or so, when Aaron and Simon were growing up, the cards tended to feature them with humorous captions. The first of these saw the pair of them at our dining table, aged 6 and 3, both bespectacled, ala The Two Ronnies, captioned “It’s a Merry Christmas from me… and it’s a Happy New Year from him!” Others borrowed from topicality and fads including, among other things, the Ninja Turtles and our ‘new’ Commodore computer (which is still up the attic somewhere).
More recently though, I literally stumbled upon a theme that might last for the foreseeable future – the Madonna and Child. I happened to produce our 2007 Christmas card using an image of the Madonna and Child, taken in a monastery in Alcobaca, while on holiday in Portugal, but the following year we nearly fell over a pavement sculpture in Monopoli, Italy depicting the same subject. I snapped it and suddenly we had a theme.
Needless to say our holidays now include a search for Madonna and Child images. Crakow alone has given me enough images for another eight or nine years!
This year is the 5th in the series. The image turned up most unexpectedly, not in a church or a chapel, but at an antiques market in Lucca, Italy, in July this year. There they were, mother and child, sitting on a beautiful antique chair, between a coffee table and chest of drawers, in the shade, out of the heat of the gorgeous Italian sunshine! Beautiful.
The four previous Christmas Madonnas are shown below. By a coincidence, the tapestry was hanging in the apartment we rented in Crakow, Poland, while the wooden icon was spotted in a Cracow museum. Following these are some of the early ones, namely ‘Dots’, ‘Two Ronnies’, ‘Star’, ’E.T.’, ‘Good News’, ‘Red, Red Robin’ and ‘Commodore’.
Merry Christmas to you all. Have a great 2012.