The Ghosts of Christmas Cards Past

Every Christmas we try to be creative with our Christmas Cards/letters that we send out. If you have received one of our cards over the years, you may wait in anticipation of the next "Mundy Family Christmas Card", wondering if it will be as good, or at least as interesting as "last year's". Also, if you've just recently gotten on our mailing/emailing list, you may wonder what you've been missing in the past. So, I had Karen scrounge around and find representatives of past Christmases that I might share with you on this blog site. We started trying to do humorous cards when the kids were younger, more than ten years ago, I think. I honestly can't remember if we were able to pull it off each year, but I think we did. However, we were not able to come up with one from each year. But, we found a bunch and so I am including them below in order of the year they were presented from earliest to most recent, with some explanation. You can click on the images to enlarge them for better viewing.

Last year, Christmas, 2007, was fun to try to get all of us in the picture again, plus Mom Preece and Connie, the new additions to our household. Celebrity mug shots that we had seen around that time, of Mel Gibson and others were the inspiration for this one and I eventually came up with a workable and humorous caption. The individual mug shots turned out pretty good, with Tyler's photo shop work putting in the background. The monikers were mostly funny too.

















Christmas 2006 has to be my favorite so far and it set the bar pretty high. I actually had the idea of a Super Hero based card for a couple of years, but either wasn't able to get the other family members to think seriously--right word?--about it, or I wasn't exactly sure weather to do it in costume or go the comics drawing route. It finally made sense to me to do the drawings and I asked Tyler to do the drawings--most of my kids, Karen or myself could have done respectable jobs, but Tyler liked the idea and ran with it, doing a great job. To elaborate on the joke, I insisted on having written discriptions of our character--super powers, or lack there of, weakness, etc. I think most everyone came up with their own super hero identities with some suggestions of my own and I did the bulk of the writing giving edtting power to the family members. This of course made the card a bigger deal than the others thus far and since, but it made it more entertaining and memorable.























Christmas 2005 was a particularly creative one, I thought. It consists of sculptured busts of all of our family members which I had done the year prior--I was just getting back in to sculpture after almost 37 years--with Santa hats we purchased for the occasion and a caption refering to Christmas busting out all over. Clever, if I do say so.
















Christmas 2004 was one of our better ones. The theme, of course, is "Movie Characters" and the heading, "Merry Christmas, Coming To A Location Near You". The fun part, we thought, would be for our friends to guess which film character we were presenting. The harder ones were Jesse as "Ash" )Bruce Campbell's character from the "Living Dead" movies)and Heidi as "Laura Croft, Tomb Raider". Ingrid, of course, is "Marilyn Monroe";Tyler is "James Bond" (Connery's); Dylan is Harry What's-his-name; Karen is Mary What's-her-name; and I am Tevye, from "Fiddler".















Christmas 2003 was our nod to the Brady Bunch opening. Karen wrote some lyrics to be sung to the Brady Bunch song. Cute, if nothing else. Tyler was actually serving in a church mission in Chile at the time, so we opted for the different frames idea. Note: The sculpture is one Tyler did earlier of Weezer (Tyler's favorite band)front man, Rivers Cuomo--we were short one family member to fill all of the frames.















I think Christmas, 2002, was a year when we knew we would not have everyone around near Christmas, so we took an early picture in a park. We had no "Big Idea" for a card but we thought that if we put thought baloons with our individual Christmas wishes, it would be humorous. You be the judge.















Christmas, 2000, found us during our stay in Kansas and we chose to do the card based on our "Old West" picture of our family taken at "Worlds of Fun", in Kansas City. The caption, "Have a Merry Christmas, or Else", seemed appropriate.















Christmas 1999 was our year to do a motorcycle-related card. My brother had a bike and Jesse owned the small one that Dylan is sitting on and he later bought one of the bigger bikes from his cousin, Tommy, and sold the smaller one to tyler. The other bikes belonged to friends from work. The card was mildy cute and the Happy Hogidays caption was good, if not hilarious.















Christmas 1998 was also a good one and a popular one with card receivers. We paid homage to my love for the "Blues" and used the mental image of the Mundys as the BLUES BROTHERS BAND, with black suits and black pork-pie hats with the Caption "It'll Be A Blue Christmas Without You."















Christmas 1997, I think, was our first Christmas after moving back to my hometown of Topeka, Kansas, fro Nashville, TN. I think Karen and I thought it would be cute, since we were now living in the countrified farming and ranching state of Kansas, to do a card based on the famous painting, "American Gothic". We found a bunch of pitchforks, threw on our overhauls, scouted out a farm near our home and went to ask if we could take a picture in their yard. The people weren't at home, so we went for it any way. It was funny to learn later that people who received our card thought we had actually moved on to a farm.















I think that 1990 was the first Christmas card we did, where we tried to be creative. "The Simpsons" was ver popular at the time, so I drew us as the Simsonesque Mundys. This was before Dylan was born and we had two "Barts" to make our family fit. I thought it was a fun Card. I had to put my old mole--I had it removed a few years back--and a heavier beard on Homer and a dot on the end of Marge's nose and non-bufant big hair to identify her as Karen--that freckle is no longer there these days, which makes me wonder...





Anyway, this card got the tradition started. We'll try to keep it up. I don't know what our kids plan to do as they go their separate ways, but I don't suppose the apples will fall to far away from the tree.