Family Alive

I’m just not meant to do Christmas cards. It’s unbelievable all the things that have happened to make it not happen thus far.

First, we got our family pictures taken at the beginning of NOVEMBER, in plenty of time to get them ready to send out. The photo place gave us 6 photo cards, but they were $1 each to order more, and I was getting a big enough package to get a disc with the images. I figured I’d make our own at one of the many places that does that. When I got home, I found the images were not high-resolution, essentially not good enough quality to print out at 4×6. ARG.

I played around with them in Photoshop and created a nice collage of the family picture and the individual pictures of Analise and Josiah smiling. Printed out, it looked great, so I planned to upload it to Sam’s Club and pick up the prints before we headed Up North for Christmas. After uploading as I was placing my order, I came to the page where you had to agree that you weren’t using copyrighted material. Stumped again, needing to see what my morally-upright husband thought of this (he’s got strong feelings about copyright issues).

He and I both felt that we’d bought the disc, and I was using the low-res images, and never were we told that we couldn’t use these images in any way. The photo place never says anything about copyright, and so we both felt it was ok for us to use them, especially since they were the low-res images we’d paid for. But I know for a fact that Wal-Mart and Sam’s are very strict about not printing anything that looks even remotely professional, so I didn’t get them printed before we left or even while we were gone.

Finally Brian took the file to CVS to print on their kiosk, and we got the printed 4×6 pictures late last week – and they look very very nice. I was excited to put them in photo-frame Christmas cards that Brian’s mom had given us. I’d been planning to use these all along.

I just sat down to put them in the photo frame and found that the frame area is cut to fit either a 3 1/2×5" picture or a 4×6" picture. Unfortunately, that means that a good part of my picture – notably the kids – is hidden behind the frame. Stumped again!! AG!

Thankfully, in writing this, I just remembered that I bought some beautiful Christmas cards on deep discount last week, intending to use them next year, so I may use those instead. Maybe you’ll see one in your mailbox before March…