This Card’s for You

I’m not sure what started me making my own Christmas cards. Perhaps it was an attempt to personalize the cards or perhaps merely an attempt to stretch my teacher’s salary, but I do know I started making my own Christmas cards in 1974 with this card:

Having taken photography and calligraphy classes, it wasn’t too hard to make these cards. I was pretty proud of them, but years later I learned most people didn’t realize that I’d made the cards rather than buying them.

I continued to make photo greeting cards for several years but without a wife to insist we needed to send cards to people I didn’t really know, I didn’t send out cards for quite a while. Recently, though, after seeing a number of homemade cards in a craft store, I decided I wanted to try to start making my own cards again.

I’ve been doing so for several years now, as demonstrated by this card:

Though the photo can’t capture the three-dimensionality and texture that I love most about these cards, it does reflect the kinds of cards I’ve been making recently. In a sense, even these cards are mass-produced because I used three store-bought stamps on just the front of this card. Still, there’s enough originality involved that I consider them mine.’

Luckily, I don’t send out nearly as many cards as I used to because each card is an original, and it usually takes several hours to make one I can live with. I often use them to enclose money orders when I just can’t seem to come up with the right present for someone.

Sorry for the money.
I meant to give
a part of myself.

2 thoughts on “This Card’s for You”

  1. Dear Loren,

    Greetings! Wow- I love your site!!! HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO YOU AND YOUR FAMILY!!!

    A friend sent me your link and suggested that I contact you.

    My name is Ruth Mendelson. I am a composer (I score films for a living and teach Advanced Film Composition at Berklee College of Music in Boston)- deeply committed to aspects of Healing and Music- and have just launched a web site that could be of interest to you.

    Here’s the link: I hope you have flash and speakers!

    http://www.ruthmendelson.com/

    The “Amazing Jellies” CD was originally composed for the New England Aquarium’s exhibit re: jellyfish and saving the oceans. I was commissioned by the Aquarium to write the music last spring. The process of “writing” the music was extraordinary. I cried most of the time- the Love that was coming through was so purely Beautiful.

    About 3 months ago, a teacher who was visiting the exhibit was so taken by the music she wrote about it on an internet teachers forum, saying that it had the strong potential to help her students learn. Before I knew it, I was flooded with CD orders from teachers all across the US.

    I received SO many requests that I did a remix of the music for home systems (there are often 24 tracks of sound- each gently moving in different directions, just as layers of water move within the ocean). That’s when I put the web site up, featuring a few brief clips of the score.

    Since then, several mothers of autistic children are using the CD, claiming that it’s the ONLY thing that helps their children calm down and become aware of the space around them (see “listener comments” on the web site). A Mayan Elder just ordered 10 of them from Mexico, a man in CT just ordered one for his elderly mother who is going in for surgery this Friday (she wants the CD as part of her post-op care), a woman with MS just wrote to me saying that the music is relieving her of her pain, several massage therapists are using it with clients, teachers are telling me that it’s helping their students develop reading skills, LOTS of people are using it to deepen their Meditations and chill out. There’s a LOT of Medicine in this Music and i am deeply humbled and grateful to be of service in this way.

    If there is anyone who feel could benefit from this, would you mind passing on this link to them? The CD carries much Light and has the potential to Bless many.

    Thank you so much for checking this out.

    Blessings to you and all the circles you touch,

    -Ruth Mendelson

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