Christmas 1946 was the Lloyd Wright family’s first Christmas in Junction City. That year, this Christmas card was created (and I presume, mailed to friends, or at least relatives).

Today this card’s construction paper background is a faded pumpkin orange color, but I made the assumption that it was originally some shade of red. On that basis, I took the liberty of restoring a more red color to it.

What a lot of work, to create a mimeograph stencil with a typewriter (without making any typing errors), then run these cards off (getting mimeograph ink all over yourself in the process), then cut out little circles of photograph and glue them to each card! How things have changed in the intervening years! Today even a not overly technical person could use a word processing or desktop publishing application to implement this same concept with essentially perfect characters in a variety of styles, photos cropped in perfect circles around perfect-sized and perfectly exposed faces (no gluing required), then converted to a PDF and emailed to all your friends and relatives (or if you must, printed and sent through the post).

But setting discussion of technology aside, and focusing on the photos (which is what I’m supposed to be doing!), these are really nice photos of the “Big Five.” I may yet come across uncropped copies of these photos, but I have not to this point. The only ones I’ve seen are glued to this card or one other like it. The physical card is small—just 3¼ by 5½ inches. The circles of photograph are about ⅝ inch in diameter. So depending on the device on which you are viewing this post, you are likely seeing the photos larger and with greater clarity in the above image than if you were looking at the original card. So you can see how cute the kids are. Except Donna. She’s not cute, she’s “grown up.” (And don’t you forget it!) ;–)