Well, I finally finished the Christmas project I started for my-mother in-law a few months ago.  You might recall that my mother-in-law’s gift to her sister (my wife’s aunt) was a nice family portrait.  Of course, I was volunteered to be the photographer because my price was right (free).

My wife’s aunt finally chose the photo that she and her family liked best.  They only had one request: that I Photoshop out a stain on somebody’s jeans.  No problem.  I fixed that in a few minutes.  Then I uploaded the photo to Costco and ordered a 20 x 30 canvas print.  It finally arrived.  It looks amazing, and it’s freaking huge.  I’m both surprised and proud that a photograph so nice came from me.  We plan on presenting the canvas print to her family this weekend.  I can’t wait to see their reaction.

The man in me feels the need to breakdown who contributed to this project.  I know doing this is a little petty, but who cares.  It’s not like any of them read this blog.  So here is the breakdown:

• Coming up with the whole idea: my wife
• Location scouting: my wife and me
• Planning / scheduling the photo shoot: my wife
• Posing the photos: me
• Taking the photos: me
• Uploading to the computer: me
• Creating a slideshow and distributing digital copies: me
• Choosing the best photo: my wife’s aunt
• Editing in Photoshop: me
• Uploading and ordering the canvas print: me
• Paying for print: mothe-in-law (reimbursed me…to the penny…no extra funds for time and effort…not that it matters)

For the most part it was a positive experience: my in-laws love and trust my photo abilities, I learned some manual settings on my camera, I got to do a little Phototshop, and I learned that Costco’s canvas prints are awesome.

Christmas is finally over.  It’s time to take down the Christmas tree (did that tonight), put away the decorations (my wife’s doing that now), pack away the Christmas movies, and delete the Christmas station on Pandora (we listen to it on our Blu Ray player).  We need to finish eating (or throw out) all the sweets, treats, and candy before the boys get hooked on sugar.  We need to find a place for all the new toys Santa brought by rotating out the old toys.

Now it’s time to get back to real life.  It’s time to starting planning for 2010.

I’ve been busy lately with Christmas stuff and work.  Here’s a run down of the Manly Dad’s annual Christmas to-do list:

1. Mail the Christmas cards.  We got those on time (barely) this year. My wife gets most o the credit here, but she did make me lick the envelopes for the ones sent to my friends and family.

2. Move Elrod every night. On Christmas Eve (today), he sits on top of the Christmas tree. The boys’ Christmas excitement is at an all time high since they saw Elrod on the tree.

3. Go see Christmas lights. There are two places near our home where you can drive through cool Christmas light displays. We did one the other night that was real nice and had a great nativity scene at the end. We’re doing the other display tonight with my wife’s relatives.

4. Do the annual Christmas dinner with the relatives.  We did that last night. It was fun to visit with the family. The little kids reenacted the nativity scene.  My 4 year old was a wise man.  He was supposed to be Joseph, but he changed his mind at the last minute when he saw the wise man costume had a crown.  I can’t blame him.  Crowns are cool.

5. Watch a cheesy Christmas movie with the wife.  Done.  We rented Four Christmases the other night. I was pleasantly surprised with the movie.

My wife is great at Christmas gifts.  She does it the right way by putting time and thought into each gift.  Over the years she has perfected the annual gift for our parents and grandparents: a personalized calendar.

This gift works perfectly for our talents and hobbies.  My wife’s talent is scrapbooking.  Thanks to her years as a high school yearbook editor, she has a great eye for page layout.  My hobby (I can’t quite call it a talent) is taking photos.

Here’s how the process works:

1. Throughout the year she reminds me to take good photos during family gatherings.
2. My wife selects the best photos of my kids and our nieces/nephews.
3. My wife arranges the photos in calendar project in iPhoto.
4. I order the calendars and have them shipped directly to our parents and grandparents.

This year I decided to kick up the calendar a notch by adding birthdays and anniversaries.  Of course I could have easily typed those into the calendar right in iPhoto…but then I’d have to do it every year.  Like any thoughtful (and slightly lazy) man, I found a way to automate this for years to come.  This is how:

1. I created a birthday calendar (one for each side of the family) in Google Calendar.
2. Each birthday and anniversary is an all-day event that repeats annually.
3. I subscribed to those Google calendars in my Mac’s iCal application.
4. I updated the gift calendar setting in iPhoto to import the desired calendars.

It worked perfectly.  Of course I could have skipped Google Calendar all together and just done the birthday calendars right in iCal, but I use Google Calendar for everything else so I wanted those calendars in the same spot.

Image source: Google

I admit it: I failed as a man for Christmas lights.  The only Christmas lights on or in my house are the ones on my Chrismtas tree.  I can’t even take credit for that…my tree is one of those pre-lit artificial trees.  I did nothing this year for lights.

Of course, like any man, I have my excuses:

1. The Thanksigiving road trip killed the timing
2. I had other important things going on…like making sure the lawn was winterized
3. One of my neighbors didn’t put up lights either

The real excuse?  I was lazy and didn’t want to do it.  My bad.

But this dude went out of his way to sufficiently “man up” his Christmas decorations:

Hat tip to my buddy for forwarding me that video.

Throughout the year, my four year old is a typical four year old: he runs, jumps, breaks things, picks on his little brother…basically doing stuff that he just can’t seem figure out when it’s appropriate behavior or not.  Well, over the last week he has been working his hardest to be on the nice list for Santa.  What changed, Manly Dad? Simple.  We have a visitor.

His name is Elrod the Elf.  He visits us everyday between now and Christmas.  But he’s not a normal elf; he’s one of Santa’s helpers.  You see, Elrod likes to find a place high in our house (like above the kitchen cabinets) to sit all day.  He sits there quietly observing our boys’ behavior to help Santa know if they are naughty or nice.  Each night he returns to Santa to give him a status update.  Each morning he finds a new place to watch the boys.

My boys are careful not to talk to or touch Elrod because they don’t want Elrod to lose his magic.

Oh…and a BIG thank you to my mother-in-law for introducing Elrod to our family.

Image source: ManlyDad.com

My son looked at the now decorated Christmas tree and asked, “is it Christmas Eve now?”

“No,” I said.

“But it’s dark outside and there is snow,” he explained.

“Sorry buddy.  We still have another 15 days to go until Christmas Eve,” I replied.

That’s the conversation I had last night with my 4 year old.  As a one or two year old he was clueless about Christmas.  Last year was the year we explained how Christmas works: Santa, elves, Jesus’ birthday, presents, etc.

Christmas is a whole new ballgame as a 4 year old.  This year he gets it…and he’s excited for it.  His excitement is contagious.  At his request, we’ve had Christmas music playing in our house the last few days.  He likes to tell us all about the naughty and nice list.  A week later and he’s still talking about visiting Santa Claus at the mall.  He even made up his own lyrics to Santa Claus is Coming to Town:

You better not toot, You better not whine, you better not cry I’m telling you why, Santa Claus is coming to town….He hears you when you’re tooting, he smells you when you fart, he sees you when you pick your nose, so be good for goodness sake

Yep, those are his lyrics (with a little help from me).

It’s official: I’m excited for Christmas.

Yeah, I said it.  Bah, humbug!

Let me set a few things straight.  I love Christmas…I love getting gifts (giving gifts is another issue / blog post?)…I love some of the music (see my previous post)…BUT I hate Christmas decorations.

I hate that it takes forever to get the tree set up just right.  I hate putting the decorations away after Christmas.  I hate that I spent a lot of money on these things that only come out 20-30 days per year.  Most of all, I hate how the kids can’t keep their fingers off the decorations.  It’s a losing battle.

My 4 year old is starting to get it, but he still likes to grab for his favorite ornaments and rearrange them in a pattern pleasing to him – - he likes to put the similar ornaments in clusters rather than spread them out on the tree.  My 18 month old just likes walking off with any ornament or decoration he can get his hands on.  It’s exhausting trying to keep decorations and ornaments intact for the season.

But like other trials, this too shall pass.  Someday, when the kids are older than 5 or 6, they’ll be the ones putting up the decorations.  They’ll be the ones hanging the ornaments neatly on the tree.  And nobody will will touch them once they’re in place.  Someday…

Thanksgiving is over.  It’s officially time to fire up Christmas music on iTunes.  And what kind of Christmas music does the Manly Dad listen to? Great question, Mr. Italicized voice.  Trans-Siberian Orchestra is the “go to” Christmas music for the Manly Dad.

TSO is a perfect mix of traditional Christmas music, jazzy/bluesy sounding music, and manly rock-opera music.  The Wife prefers MoTab Christmas music, but I can only handle so much of that.  It’s just not manly enough for me.

The Trans-Siberian Orchestra is manly.  Don’t believe me?  Check out this Christmas light show set to a TSO song:

This photo project just won’t die.  This is probably the most work I’ve done for photos.  Normally, I just shoot the photos, upload to iPhoto, and print as needed.  Sometimes I’ll do some minor adjustments, but nothing that takes more than a few seconds.  My goal is to take photos that need as little processing in iPhoto or Photoshop as possible…mostly because I suck at Photoshop.

For the in-law photos I did my usual thing: I uploaded to iPhoto and deleted the terrible photos.  I was left with 75 decent to great shots and I selected 21 as my favorite.  At this point, I thought I was done.  My wife had other thoughts.

Now, my new assignment was to convert the 21 favorites to black and white.  Converting to black and white in iPhoto is decent, but I opted for Photoshop because I have much more control and the end product is noticeably better.  An hour later, the black and white photos were ready.

Then I made the big mistake: I showed my wife a 2 minute slideshow in iPhoto using the 21 best photos.   That one act cost me two more hours.  Now, she wanted to make an official slideshow and burn it to DVD.  I probably could have done it in 15 minutes, but I’m a perfectionist.  So, I meticulously put the photos in a pleasing order. I studied the different slideshow themes in iPhoto.  I dug deep into my iTunes library to find the best music to go with the slideshow.  Each time I made a change, the perfectionist in me had to preview the slideshow to make sure it was just right.

After all that tweaking, the slideshow was ready to burn. I moved it over to iDVD, selected a theme, and hit burn.  I tried out the DVD in on my TV.  It looked good.

My wife is giving her aunt the photos and slideshow today.  I have a feeling that I’m still not completely done with this project…