blog:binderama

Growing up, I never really understood the Christmas card thing.  People went out and bought essentially the same cards and sent them to one another.  The cards’ designs had little to do with their lives — most people didn’t live on a snowy farm in Vermont with a sleigh parked outside.  The more abstract versions might include angels or doves.  There were mangers and magi and stars in the East.  Inside, you might find a verse or a salutation, again, not indicative of that person’s place or time.

Maybe they believed in the message, but who hasn’t got behind the “Peace on Earth” rhetoric?  To me, the sentiment of the cards registered no further than the $5.99/dozen price tag at the Ben Franklin store.

Even today, in this niche-expressive world, the cards I get are mostly bought, signed and sent with little regard for the relationship I share with the sender.  There are more photo cards of my friends and their families, sometimes all wearing white and kneeling in the sand at a beach or sporting a red nose and antlers.   Cute…but didn’t you send me that same card last year?

Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE receiving cards.  But, come on, let’s get beyond the Walmart mentality.

So since 1994, the first year I lived in NYC, I decided I would use the Christmas card as a way to celebrate the holiday, remind my friends why we are friends, and offer some insight into my current state of mind (yes, sometimes cynical, but often pithy too).  These are produced entirely in Photoshop, using only one finger on my laptop’s touchpad.   Herewith the chronology of the binderama Christmas tradition.

1994′s card was atrociously narcissistic, in hindsight. I was feeling full of myself, and I hadn’t quite figured out the city or my place in it; and the the card-sharing was more celebration that relation.. Plus, I thought I was a Photoshop guru.  Another recollection is that awkward moment retrieving my prints from the 1-hour photo place…back when such things are necessary.  The guy must have thought me quite odd for taking a roll of pics of myself standing in my bedroom, pointing to the sky and wearing sunglasses and a Santa hat.

1995.  I hadn’t learned much, nor had I gained any sense of humility.  I’m actually pretty embarrassed by this one, but…it happened.  This was also a lesson in the limits of digital printing at the time.  I had to take my floppy disk to Kinkos and run off a few test prints to calibrate color on their machines.  In those days, the meter was running, so I would be rushed to get it right.  Even so, the prints were pretty bad.

Skip ahead  to 1997. I finally recognized the solitude that New York City can give to a man. I become a faceless silhouette.   In the words of E.B. White…NYC can “bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy”  Yep.  What’s odd about this is that I can’t explain where the power source would have been.

1998.  I’m not even in the card, but this  fairly depicts the warmth and color of my life in that year…along with the solitude.  That steam pipe is real, and I did put lights on it…ouch.   The rest is fiction, save for the mouse, whose progeny plagued me for my entire tenure in NYC.

1999.  I didn’t know it then, but this would be my last Christmas in New York.  Non-published versions included a cab approaching the intersection, about to plow the angel…but I’m not THAT cynical.  The scene is complete fiction, culled from five years of snowy nights when I would walk aimlessly through the city, soaking up the stillness and energy.

2000. My only Xmas in Vegas.  This was a lot  of fun, and I’m surprised there isn’t a property like this yet.  This is the first year I went for details in the writing.

On to Los Angeles in 2001. Coming on the heels of 9/11, the mood was not as joyous as in years past, so, in retrospect, this is a pretty cliched theme…and it’s strange to recall that adding Santa and his team was an afterthought.

2002.  Now immersed in the SoCal scene, I blended the vanity with the cynical and more than a dash of self-deprecation.  Of course, if I’d had the funds, I probably would’ve gone through with the work.

The first “serial” card arrived in 2003.  I had to think hard about who I might have become after all the plastic surgeries.  And sure enough, I happened upon Lorenzo Lamas, the perfect symbol of shiny SoCal vanity.

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The Binger arrived in 2004 and became the perfect foil for the card.  I actually worked though four or five different scenes from The Grinch before I settled on this one that captured his boundless spirit.

There was no card in 2005 because the Binger had to be put to sleep just before Thanksgiving.  I was too distraught to contemplate a card that year.  (I did consider a nuanced black card, a la The New Yorker, post 9/11…but that would have been wrong, so wrong.)

2006 marked my move to Northern California.  My East Coast sensibilities are often at odds with the politics around here, and I really enjoy sticking to my guns in the face of liberal opposition at cocktail parties.  Plus, tree-sitters make me laugh.  This is the first time I featured another person in the card, and she went along very begrudgingly.

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2007 was a really good year, and there was so much too cover.  What better way than with PowerPoint!  And not just one slide, but three!  Like the year itself, designing the card was a great deal of fun.

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Things were very different in 2008, and I went with the zeitgeist surrounding the Obama craze.  Hope surely summed up my own attitude at the moment.  But getting the dogs to stare off into the sky and look “hopeful” was no easy feat.  The other challenge was finding the right tones of red and green.  Not sure I nailed that.  (this RGB version is quite different from the CMYK of the prints)

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Okay, all caught up on the tradition.  The next post will include the 2009 card.  Come back soon!