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Jaci and I have decided that Christmas cards should be a permanent fixture of the holiday time for our family. I believe in the past we have sent out cards to just family, but this year was the first year that we gave some thought into the matter, and therefore we hope the beginning of successful card giving from here on out. To that end, we created our master Christmas Card list- the one that shall be edited in the future based on naughtiness or niceness with the Bengforts- and we staged our first photo shoot in a hopefully long line of Christmas card photo shoots.

Because many of you were so impressed with the card, we thought that we should share it online now that Christmas is over and everyone should have already received their card. Also, some of you who did receive cards may not recognize this picture, and we figured we had better explain why before we got into trouble (we hope to maintain our niceness on other’s Christmas card lists!) First- if you didn’t receive a print card, that is completely my fault. Our list was fairly short in the beginning- so I only ordered 20 cards, however, during the shipping of the cards, the list ballooned past 40, so as a stop gap measure, we printed pictures and included them in some store bought cards. Also, if you received the so called “nice family picture”, that was because we didn’t realize what a hit the picture would be, and thought we had better also look semi-sane to our relatives. Our bad- if you want a copy of the card picture (or the nice picture) let me know and I can make that happen!

Secondly- the question I get most commonly: “Were Winston’s eyes photoshopped?”  No, in fact it was not! While I did use Photoshop to produce that nice warm yellow and red tone to the picture, create good color contrast and balance, and generally touch up the picture, Winston and his eyes are pure products of his doggy modeling ability. Our original intent was that I would be lifting him to the top of the tree as the angel on top. After two attempts at this, both Winston and I felt that we couldn’t keep that up. Instead, we switched over to the pointing method. Winston still refused to cooperate, probably due to the previous two episodes where I was trying to pick him up. However, during the 10th attempt, he finally sat- and this was the resulting image!

We were incredibly lucky to get this shot, and in only 10 tries! As you can see from the nice picture below, Winston refused to behave for even the nice pictures, but we were glad we caught him so photogenically! Here’s hoping your little angels cooperated more this holiday! Happy Boxing Day!