Christmas card photo ideas you can actually shoot yourself

15 family Christmas photo ideas

• 1. Pajama stairs. Everyone in matching pajamas on the staircase, smallest on the bottom step. It's a classic because the stairs do the arranging for you.
• 2. The tangled lights. One person "testing" a string of lights, wrapped up to the shoulders, while everyone else watches with zero sympathy.
• 3. Flour cloud. Bake cookies, then toss one handful of flour in the air on three. Shoot in burst mode. Vacuum later.
• 4. The car. Everyone buckled in with a tree tied to the roof, shot from the front through the windshield. A driveway works. So does a fake tree.
• 5. Walking away. The family walks off down a snowy, rainy or perfectly ordinary street holding hands. Nobody has to smile, which is its own present.
• 6. Under the tree. Everyone lies on their back with heads together under the tree while you shoot down from a step stool. The lights do the work.
• 7. Cocoa lineup. Everyone holds a mug, lined up by height, with the biggest mug in the smallest hands.
• 8. The wrapped kid. One child wrapped in paper up to the chin, bow on top, gift tag reading "Do not open until Dec. 25."
• 9. Grandparents in the middle. Grandparents on the sofa, grandkids piled on and around them, nobody posed. Say the dog's name in a silly voice and shoot the laugh.
• 10. The year in props. Everyone holds one thing that sums up their year: a cast, a diploma, car keys, a sourdough starter.
• 11. Snow angels from above. Shoot straight down from a ladder or an upstairs window. No snow? Lie on a white sheet.
• 12. Checking the list. One parent in reading glasses studies a very long scroll while every kid looks extremely innocent.
• 13. Dog's-eye view. Get on the floor and shoot past the dog's ears, dog sharp, family soft behind. The dog is the main character now.
• 14. One dissenter. Everyone in the same sweater except one person in something completely wrong, standing proudly in the middle.
• 15. Breakfast chaos. Christmas morning at the table, mid-pancake, before anyone has brushed their hair. It looks like your actual family because it is.

6 funny Christmas card photo ideas

If your family can't keep a straight face anyway, lean in. These work best when everyone plays it completely serious. For more along these lines, see our funny Christmas cards.

• 16. The 1980s studio portrait. A bright blue bedsheet behind you, everyone stacked by height, one hand on each shoulder, deeply solemn faces.
• 17. The tree fell. Tip a small tree on its side behind a family smiling as hard as it can. Nobody turns around.
• 18. Sleeping Santa. Dad in a Santa hat asleep on the couch with cookie crumbs on his chest, kids tiptoeing past carrying the presents.
• 19. The family band. Pots, pans and wooden spoons, everyone mid-performance, one person with fingers in their ears.
• 20. The dog did it. Shredded wrapping paper everywhere, the dog sitting calmly in the middle, every human pointing at the dog.
• 21. Take 47. Use the outtake as the card: one kid crying, one blinking, dad lunging for the timer. Caption it "Our best shot."

How to take the Christmas card photo yourself

• Use window light. Face everyone toward a big window in the morning or late afternoon and switch off the overhead lights. A phone flash makes everyone look arrested.
• Use the timer and burst mode. Take fifty frames. One of them will have every pair of eyes open, and it won't be the one you expect.
• Shoot at the kids' eye level, not yours. Crouch. Your knees will forgive you by January.
• Give hands a job: mugs, ornaments, the dog. People with nothing to hold do strange things with their arms.
• Leave room at the top for the greeting, and shoot vertical, since most cards and all phones are tall.
• Shoot early if you're printing. USPS wants First-Class cards mailed by Thursday, December 17 to arrive before Christmas (usps.com/holiday/holiday-shipping-dates.htm), so take the photo by Thanksgiving weekend and give the printer time.

The Christmas card ideas we built (and the takes that went wrong)

We make photo cards too, minus the staircase. You add one clear photo of each person, up to five, and they show up together in the scene. Every idea is tried many times on a test family of made-up people, none of whom exist, and graded on whether everyone still looks like themselves, whether it's funny and whether it's well made. Most takes don't make it. Here are a few that didn't.

Card Photo, Take 47 is idea 21 with a twist: the family smiles on garland-wrapped stairs in matching plaid pajamas while a puppy behind them, tangled in lights, tugs at the tree. No take ever drew the tree mid-fall, so the picture stays flattering and the tree comes down in the video. One take left the tree alone and stood the puppy on the banister garland, like a cat.

The snow globe needed one rule. Early takes put the family in a globe on a mantel and the faces shrank until they stopped looking like anyone. Now the globe fills the frame, the people inside are painted porcelain figurines with their own faces, and in the video a cat's paw taps the glass.

Cookie chaos didn't make it. The brief: matching pajamas, an exploded bag of flour, the toddler sitting in the mixing bowl. The takes delivered almost no flour, a dad who kept his gray T-shirt, a kitten nobody asked for, and a toddler in a bowl that grandma and dad held between them like a soup tureen. It lives on as idea 3, for families with a real kitchen. And the family pulling Santa's sleigh has its own post, about Santa's reindeer names.

Christmas card ideas when nobody will pose

Sometimes the group photo isn't happening. A kid's away at college, grandpa lives three time zones away, the dog has opinions. A card made from separate photos gets around it: pick one clear, front-facing photo of each person, in good light and without sunglasses, and the card puts them in one scene, on the sleigh, in the globe or on the stairs. What comes back is four pictures plus a short video, delivered as a link any phone can open.

Either way, the words do half the work. Sign it with the right plural, using our guide to last names in plural, put a short line under the picture, and if you'd rather skip the tripod this year, every card we make is on our Christmas cards page.