How to photograph Christmas lights

Here are some excellent suggestions on how to take not only decent, but quite possibly fantastic, digital images of Christmas lights.

A fun project for kids: Make your own Christmas ornaments

Instructions: Paste each picture onto cardboard and cut out along the dotted lines (always use safety scissors so you don't cut yourself). Color with plain or glitter crayons,  with paint or felt-tip markers - whatever you've got. Punch out the black dots and string with bright ribbon, then hang them on the tree, over the mantle of the firepace if you have one, in your room, or wherever your folks say it's okay to hang them. These can also be glued to wood or cloth. Parents & guardians: younger children may require some help with this.

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Thanks to Graylady.

The First Christmas Card

In the early 19th century it was common for schoolboys to showcase their penmanship skills by producing elegant decorative notepaper for family use in writing friends and relatives during the holiday season. Perhaps an offshoot of this was the Valentine's card mania, which started in Britain in the 1820s and gradually spread to the U.S. and Canada.

It was not until 1843, however, that this notion of sending cards spread to Christmas. That year, Henry Cole (1808-82), English businessman and patron of the arts, enlisted the services of English artist John Horsley to produce 1000 Christmas-themed cards that he could give to his friends and business associates. The result was the portrait of a family enjoying a cup of punch, framed by depictions of charity: feeding and clothing the poor.

At a shilling each, a card such as this was too expensive for the average commoner; however, the 1850s saw the mass-production of Christmas cards accompanied by cheap postal rates, and so the practice of sending Christmas cards began in earnest. And it has persisted to this day.

A very old Christmas Carol: "In Excelsis Gloria"

The following page images are excerpted from : Four Old Christmas Carols Taken from Scarce Reprints of Early Manuscripts, by Ralph Fletcher Seymour, Alderbrink Press, Published by Printed under the supervision of R.F. Seymour for the Bobbs-Merrill company, 1903 (Original from Harvard University; Digitized by Google Books Nov 21, 2005)

The date of the orginal manuscript is not known to me, but it is not nearly so old as the earliest versions of Gloria in Excelsis Deo, which date back as far as the 4th century, A.D.

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"The Insects' Christmas" (1913)

"The Insect's Christmas" (Rozhdestvo obitateley lesa) was an early foray into stop-motion animation by the pioneering Russian filmmaker, Wladyslaw Starewicz. Starewicz began his experiments with animation a decade before Walt Disney, working virtually alone, filling the roles of writer, director, cameraman, designer, and animator.

"A Visit From Saint Nicholas," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Dec. 1857

Note how Saint Nick in the leading illustration has something of a rustic "gnomish" quality, as compared to later, red-suited incarnations of the fat man.



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Printing tip: these images will print better when saved to your computer and printed locally, rather than printing directly from your browser.