Sometime during the fall I begin working on my once-every-year project: our Christmas card. This is an old tradition in the Watson family, started by my father in 1950. My father was an architect and very good at drawing so his cards were all drawings. I am a photographer and when I started making cards in 1970, I used photographs. The only rule is that they must be accompanied by a quotation from the gospels, though sometime I must admit the connection is not so clear.

This card was made for Christmas 1975 and is from Luke 2:10 ”behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy”. The tidings of great joy were for us the birth of my daughter Elisabeth. I learned my lesson: I got very tired of telling people in the US what it said and now have the source in the card so the English speakers could look up the text. Things were very primitive in those days. I took the picture during a field trip my photo class took, the subject being those new-fangled lasers. For some reason they were all red and I took a lot of pictures just to have. Later I was looking around for a picture and picked this negative.

I put the negative in the enlarger and projected it onto a contact frame. The photopaper was put in the contact frame and on top of it was a piece of plastic (overhead film) that I had written the text on with a felt tipped pen. Then I exposed and printed about 50 or 80 cards. There was always a lot of spill involved in making cards.