Our Chocolate Lab Stella takes front stage in this year’s card. On the front of the card she is looking forward to Santa’s visit. Inside, she is playing with one of her new favorite toys from Santa’s workshop…with a little help from Playology. They make some great stuff for dogs, and more recently, cats.

The biggest issue of this year’s card is that it was sent out late. We have used Mimeo to create and print our cards and vacation books for several years with no problems. Unfortunately the first shipment got lost between them and the package delivery service and never arrived. They reprinted the shipment and got it to us, albeit late.

An early version of our 2023 card was going to use AI to create the image. We tried several different AI platforms to create a scene including Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus. Unfortunately, the tech is not very good at creating this type of scene. The hands and feet were distorted, malformed, and had either too many or too few fingers. The expressions on the faces were also just not right. 

On the technical side, the image was taken with my iPhone 12 Pro and edited in Photoshop. There wasn’t much editing to do this year, although getting the color and shading correct to see Stella’s expression is tricky.