Having a baby makes creating holiday cards easier and harder. It’s easier because you assume everyone wants an adorable photo of your adorable spawn. It’s harder because you then need to acquire an adorable photo of said spawn (who, in Blog land, is known as Millie). We’re fortunate to have a pretty talented and well-equipped photographer at our disposal. Plus, she’s free.

{You can see some of her ninja skillz at work here: thedollwardrobe}

Our card & photo shoot needed to fulfill a few requirements:

• Be festive but also all-holiday friendly because our family and friends are of mixed faith and we want to respect that and still send warm wishes.

• Create a cozy, holiday vibe. You know, Marshmallow Worlds and whatnot.

• Feature something new for Millie to keep her interest. It can be difficult (understatement) to get her to stay in one place for photos, but having something new would buy us a few precious minutes. But what?

So after hours of Pinterest research, we settled on Millie with some Christmas lights. (Inspiration photo here: boy wrapped in lights) We weren’t sure what to expect when Millie encountered the lights, but we figured it was worth a shot. We didn’t try for fancy lighting like the inspiration photo. We’ll save that challenge for another year when bribery will work…

After 100 or more photos, we uploaded our haul and were very happy to see several good options. It is hard to get a good photo to send out because even though you know your kid is laughing in that photo, to others she may appear to be crying or freaking out, etc. Nevertheless, we hit paydirt and I give you The Gramlings’ 2012 holiday card:

Fonts: Weston Free and Whitney. Click the font names for free downloads! (Weston has a totally kickbutt poster, too.)

Happy holidays, friends!

P.S. For more Christmas/holiday inspiration, you can visit my Pinterest board here. There’s a great link to taking photos of glowing Christmas trees that I had a lot of fun with.