One could say scatterbrained but I prefer wandering. I think my entire day was like this. I started my morning with coffee and since it was the beginning of a new week and heading toward the end of November the thought crossed my mind... you haven't started on a Christmas card yet. The coffee also might have had something to to do with it. Last year, like most years since I started making a Christmas card in some digital fashion in 1998, I was struggling with an idea for a card. It was while making coffee on November 29th 2012 that an image came into my head along with the line, "So this is Christmas and what have you done..." This the first line in John Lennon's song, Happy Xmas (War Is Over).
Coffee poured and two steps into leaving the kitchen I saw this image, what became my Christmas card almost as clearly as you can see it here.
Give or take about 1/2 hour that final image was done 24 hours after the original thought. If I were on the clock I'd probably say I put 8 or 9 hours in on the project. The idea was Lennon returning as an apparition with his message, the ideas behind War is Over, over 40 years later.
I thought about adding trees and making it more traditionally, Christmasy, festive but it didn't work. I think it didn't work because THIS is the way I really saw it.
Overall response to the thing was lackluster.
I continued down a path for a good part of the day with dozens of scattered thoughts about the holiday season and this being the first one since my mother dying. I flashed back on a lot of Christmases growing up and for a good while I was a real sad puppy. On and off I would come back to the card idea.
Christmas 2011 on the card audience front was even worse than 2012. One person who has been a good friend of mine for years blasted me on this one and the overall response was pretty flat. This idea came to me in a lucid dream one night just as I was dozing off to sleep. Except it was a dog peeing on the agitated "real live snowman." I ended up awake over the idea, got up and wrote it down.
I continued to play off the Rudy/Frosty theme however and posted more cartoons on Facebook and sent a few to friends. Again, it was basically disinterest with occasional "likes" or comments. That's all OK but not one person ever seemed to consider the work that actually went into any of this just to do something personal for the holidays. But then I concluded a long time ago that there isn't much of anything really "social" going on in social networking. Most of it is a "me" thing. So thankfully I got a chuckle out of some of these myself. These two were personal favorites.
Oh, so I was writing about my walk and my wandering mind... Yeah, so all the way up until the walk I'm back and forth between space and planet earth and it gets me out the door late. I had put on a dark sweatshirt and was thinking to grab a flashlight because I going to run into darkness but I forgot that. I forgot I was going to bring a baggie of dry cat food in case I ran into this cat again... and I forgot my camera.
I ended up shortcutting the walk some at the 1/2 way point which is also the point where I had met up with that cat before. No cat this time. However, I added blocks back into the walk as I approached streets closer to home and saw that I still had enough light to do so. I don't have a clear idea of how far I ended up walking.
And I still don't have an idea for a Christmas card.
I'll leave you with my card from 2010. I got a few nice compliments on this. An hour before I made this image I said I wasn't going to make a holiday card ever again. Maybe this year I can make that promise truly happen.
and one other thing...
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