Wednesday’s Weekly Reader: Holiday Spirit

Well, obviously I’m a day late, but it’s for a good cause: I printed the second to last screen on my Christmas cards last night (and finished tonight!). A post about them will be coming once they’re all mailed out (don’t want to ruin the surprise!).

But on to this week’s links: for the past several weeks, some rather inspiring vintage Christmas ephemera images have been popping up. So to get everyone into the holiday spirit, here are a couple of the ones that really made me excited for the holidays (and vacation time).

Vintage Cards:
I absolutely love old greeting cards and postcards from 1950 and earlier. Both Design Sponge and NOTCOT had some links/posts with great collections: 

• Design*Sponge’s Vintage Christmas Ephemera collection
   
• Delicious Industries’ Vintage card collection (via NOTCOT)
• So seeing both of those reminded me of Card Cow’s awesome gallery of turn-of-the-century postcards. They’re for sale, but also make for good reference.
   

Not strictly vintage, but…
 …the craft involved in constructing Aspen Boutique’s Christmas cards is amazing.

• Interview with Bill Gardner with an excellent gallery of the cards including the one from 2004 below:
   

 
Nutcracker Suite:
Animation Treasures featured some excellent backgrounds from the Nutcracker Suite sequence of Fantasia. 
 

Absolutely stunning. I’ve since set it as my desktop background and have had the Nutcracker Suite running through my head. Whenever I see frost on a window pane it reminds me of this specific part:

Fantasia doesn’t say Christmas to me, but this sequence definitely does. I think of this scene more often than the ballet when I hear that melody. If you’d like to enjoy the full sequence from Fantasia, click here.

Holiday Homecoming:
I’ve been thinking of this commercial a lot lately (as I do every year). This (if you ignore the coffee) just epitomizes coming home for Christmas to me:

Tags | Christmas, Ephemera, Vintage