Our annual Holiday Card exchange took place on December 9. Once upon a time this event was a great opportunity for our local members to get together to celebrate the season and display the cards at Sandy Vrem's lovely home. Sadly the pandemic put a stop to that, but it also got us acquainted with Zoom so that we could expand the celebration to include our out-of-town members. Around 30 members attended the event to see the unveiling of the 22 cards in the 2023 exchange. The difference between this exchange and the rest of our monthly exchanges is that members sign up in advance and then make one card for every member in the exchange, plus one for the NORBAG library. We rarely have more than 30 participants so it isn't too difficult to get all the cards finished in time and delivered or mailed to Dolores before the second Saturday in December.
This year was another wonderful example of the creativity of our members. Some cards featured Christmas, some the New Year or the Solstice and some utilized recycling techniques. We asked each artist to introduce themselves by saying where they live and how they learned about NORBAG before they described their card. It was amazing to learn that some of us have been members for more than 20 years while others have just joined this year. Here is an interesting statistic from Dolores, the keeper of all the records. This year we had 22 members who made 22 cards each for a total of 484 cards. If we go back to the first year of exchanging holiday cards in 1995 and add up all the cards made since then, it is a grand total of 21,670 cards! With members participating from the UK and Canada as well as across the US, we are truly a global organization!
Individual photographs of each of the exchange cards will be on our Flickr site in about a week. Until then please enjoy these two group photographs of the cards.
Happy Holidays from NORBAG!
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