Whatta card! Tips on making your own Christmas cards.

Seattle, 2005 Fiestas Patrias is a lively parade and festival every year in South Park. This baby slept on her mother's back the entire route. (ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES)

So, what is a Christmas card?

For me, it's a personal expression that comes sometime after Dec. 1 and before New Year's Day. I hope the cards I send are surprising, engaging, festive, serious or something meaningful from the year.

I get cards from car dealers, banks, environmental groups, Jimmy Carter, friends and a couple of folks I've met along the photographic trail including Lefty Luster, a one-armed Korean War vet from Big Spring, Texas. We met him outside the Alamo. I'm looking forward to exchanging cards again. He likes flag photos.

Twenty years ago I began making 4-by-6-inch prints in the darkroom then dry-mounted them on cards. Very labor intensive.

That evolved into making Xeroxes that were color copies of prints, then spray mounted. But, the fumes — well, luckily, we have no canaries.

Digital printing is how I go now, mounting the photos on 5-by-7 postcard forms with peel-off adhesive backs.

The cards are for friends, relatives and colleagues mainly in the loosely defined "photo community." Some years I'll tailor cards specifically to their recipient.

The Santa-and-hound card received one complaint so it was re-sent with a "censored" sticker over the dog's nose.

To me, the most important thing is that these photo cards are a form of self expression.

Every October in Ketchum, bands of sheep are "trailed" through the town and blessed on their way from the high country to winter feeding grounds. (ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES)
At a fundraiser for a local animal organization, this hound is merely seeing if the guy in the red suit and black boots is someone he knows. It's a dog's way of checking IDs. Santa quietly consents to be frisked. (ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES)
After the great Midwest floods of 1993, this is all that was left of my wife's family farm in the Missouri River bottoms near New Franklin one year later. (ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES)
About the only new paint in this city is on a concrete red star memorial to communist Youth in front of abandoned apartments, residents having left for central Russia. A dog takes shelter from the wind behind this wall. (ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES)