Get Carded: A Blizzard Of Birthday Greetings

Hello! My husband's birthday was yesterday, which means I had to come up with a card for the occasion. The past few years I've been making his cards with specific themes, often based on something we'd been talking about lately.

So what theme to use this year? I was stumped, until finally the day before his birthday it hit me: we'd been following the progress of the East Coast nor'easter, so there was my theme!

Having lived in the Philadelphia area in the 1990's, we are all too aware of the impact these monster storms can have. In fact, the Weather Channel referred to two past nor'easters that had hit the region worse than the weekend storm did - both occurred while we were there. One of them, the early January 1996 weather event, produced 31" of snow! But of course, this most recent storm still caused plenty of trouble.

But how to tie in a nor'easter with a birthday card? Here's how:

Materials used:

• white card stock
• snowflakes images (upper right-hand corner and middle left) cut from paper company sample booklet
• image of child out in snowstorm photocopied from 1960's children's science book
• "No nor'easter here!" cut from newspaper and 1960's parochial school magazine that had belonged to my husband
• "just a blizzard of birthday greetings!" -  a combination of rubber stamping and vintage dictionaries
• "In the city snow is a bother to most people. It makes walking and driving hard." cut from vintage children's dictionary
• "It snowed all day. Everything was covered with snow." cut from vintage children's dictionary
• "Snowstorm" word cut from newspaper article about the nor'easter; the first letter "S" was covered up with another "S" from the paper company sample booklet
• "birthday" in upper right-hand corner from vintage children's dictionary
• "Snow comes down" cut from same vintage science book that the accompanying image of a child in the snow had come from. 
• a few random rubber-stamped snowflakes images

My husband enjoyed his card! Yes, it may seem that its theme came at the expense of our former friends, neighbors and co-workers, but we don't really feel too sorry for them. No matter how much snow they may get from nor'easters, spring still comes there before it shows up here.