Christmas in October

Taking a second day off from Atria, though I actually feel fine today.  Sneezing mostly gone; sore throat gone, still coughing, but what else is new?   But just in case...

So I spent today doing "Christmas."  

The other day I used two different online places where you can do fancy stuff with photos.  At PiZap, I made this...

.

..and this ...

And then I also tried Loonapix, where I made this...,

...this...,

...and this.

(with this photo, I asked her if she thought Santa was hoping she would one day smile...I am determined to get a smiling picture out of Kukuwah some day!)

But the problem with both of those sites is  that while they have lots and lots of options for backgrounds, stickers, etc., nothing is religious and I was feeling a little uncomfortable sending these very secular, materialistic pictures to the kids (the problem with an un-religious person sending things through a very religious organization!). So this morning I rummaged through my printed stationery and found a nice one with a baby in a manger on top of it, that I bought to print our annual Christmas letter to our very religious friends!) and I wrote letters to accompany these three pictures, all about how materialistic we get in this country and what was really important about Christmas.

Then I decided that heck, I'm a creative person.  I can do Photoshop as well as the next person, so I decided to try making my own Christmas picture.   I came up with this one.

This enabled me to put a few of the remaining kids at the manger, looking over the kings visiting Jesus.  This needed no apologia from me and I liked it.  I was also tickled with how good it turned out.  I made a couple of those and then made this one...

...which allowed me to talk about singing Christmas carols and to ask if Leniel liked to sing songs at Christmas.  I still have four more to do and am trying to think about what I'm going to do with them.  I have to do these in October because it takes that long for the letters to get to all these countries (going through translators en route).  Actually I may already be a little late, but they should arrive near Christmas if not close to it.  I already sent advent calendars a month ago.

By the time Christmas gets here I'll be figuring out artwork for Easter!